A 10 - Practical Advantages

Ryder PLHV: 10 Practical Advantages PRACTICAL ADVANTAGES

Many complain of a rising sacerdotalism among us, a dangerous and unscriptural sacerdotalism. Of course there is when laymen hide their priesthood in a napkin, and carry out to the full the dangerous and unscriptural doctrine that the clergy are responsible for the souls of others, that all conversion and religious influence and reproof of evil is the business of the clergy alone. There is sure to be a one-sided and exaggerated ministerial priesthood when the laity neglect and forget their own proper priesthood. The best cure for clericalism is not to weaken the clergy, but to strengthen the laymen. If every layman fulfilled his own vocation and ministry, sacerdotalism of an unsound kind would soon be dead among us. The Church is a priestly Church, and this means more than the possession of so many thousand clergymen. It means, according to the teaching of the New Testament, that every Churchman is called to help others to make it more desirable and easier to be good, to bear the burdens of others, especially the burdens of poverty and ignorance and sin. It means that there is a general as well as a special priesthood; it means that the Christian who is not priestly in some practical way has a Christianity that is weak and starved. His own soul is not watered as it might be, because he does not water others. A useless Christian is a contradiction in terms.

JOHN GOTT, BISHOP OP TBUBO, The Priesthood of the Laity. As He is, even so are we in this world. 1 John 4:17. THE only High Priest under the Gospel recognised by the apostolic writings is our Lord Himself. The teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews is final on this matter. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is contrasting the privileges of the Jews in the earlier dispensation and of the Christians in the later. He had every reason in the course of his argument to explain what human priesthood, sacrifice by human hands, and altar the Christians possessed. But his silence is significant. He mentions no human priest or material sacrifice or altar on earth.

If the Christian ministry were a sacerdotal office, if the Holy Eucharist were a sacerdotal act in the same sense in which the Jewish priesthood and the Jewish sacrifice were sacerdotal, then his argument is faulty and misleading. Though dwelling at great length on the Christian counterparts to the Jewish priest, the Jewish altar, the Jewish sacrifice, he omits to mention the one office, the one place, the one act, which on this showing would be their truest and liveliest counterpart in the every-day worship of the Church of Christ. He has rejected all these and chosen instead moral and spiritual analogies for all these sacred types. Our Lord in utilising existing ideas deliberately annulled the cultus of His own nation. As Head of the Christian Church He has made all Christians a holy priesthood (Heb. x. 19-22): " Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which He dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh; and having a great priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in fulness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our body washed with pure water." The entering into the holy place at once suggests the light in which Christians are there regarded, for into it under the Old Testament economy priests alone could enter. There is a double reference: the one the sprinkling of blood which accompanied the consecration of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood; the other the command that when the priests entered into the tabernacle of the congregation they should first wash their hands that they died not. As priests, then, the members of the Christian Church enjoy their privilege of immediate access to the presence of God. It is so also in the Revelation of St. John. Jesus exalted in glory is a priest wearing His priestly garments in the manner in which they were worn by the priests of Israel. So we are taught in this same book that in Him all His people also are priests. They have been made a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father, and the white robes they wear throughout the book are the robes of priests. The idea of the universal Christian priesthood cannot be separated from the Christian Church. All the Lord’s people are priests. People may be led to urge that there is no priest on earth, that our Lord in heaven is the one sufficient and only Priest. But let priesthood be denned as our Lord denned it when He said, "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and give His life a ransom for many." Let the priesthood of the whole Church, not that of any particular class within her, be prominently brought forward. Let it appear that the very object of insisting on the Church’s priesthood is to restore to the Christian laity that sense of their responsibility and privilege of which Protestantism hardly less than Romanism has practically deprived them. Let the Church’s priesthood be invariably represented as a continuation of our Lord’s priesthood through her, not as something deputed to her. Let all this be done, and prejudice against this doctrine will be re moved. The commission of the Church is to represent her Lord, and as an instrument through which He acts to carry on His work. The Church represents Christ in four ways: her Life, her Work, her Worship, and her Confession.

1. The glorified Lord is to be made manifest in His people’s life. He said (St. John 17:19): "And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth." He had laid all that He was upon the altar of God, with perfect acquiescence and free will, and thus gained a place which entitled Him to be the Head of a new line of spiritual descendants. The consecration of His disciples, it is also evident, was to be the exact counterpart of His own, that they themselves also might be consecrated. The Church, in her whole process of sanctification, therefore, is only reaching onward in Christ to what Christ is. She aims at no merely pagan perfection of virtue. Her aim is to be like her Lord, and like Him in that character which distinguishes Him as the heavenly Priest, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens. Sanctification is salvation in the highest sense. It is being loosed from our sins in the blood of Christ (Revelation 1:6) which makes us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father. In the Eucharistic sacrifice the idea of offering is more forcibly and fully expressed than in any other Christian ordinance, and the Church throughout her history felt this to be the case. The offering made in the Eucharist is not an offering of death. In the Roman Mass there is an oblation in which the thing offered is destroyed or otherwise changed in order to acknowledge the supreme dominion of Almighty God over all His creatures, who, as He made us out of nothing, can again destroy us as He pleases. There is nothing of that kind here. The Eucharist is an oblation in which the offerer lives, having accepted death as the penalty of sin in Him who died on the Cross. As our Lord’s offering of Himself to His heavenly Father never ends, so in that offering His people, organically united to Him, one with Him, must be offered and offer themselves: " And here we offer and present unto Thee ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, true, and living sacrifice."

2. The glorified Lord is to be made manifest in the work of the Church. The principal work needed is for herself. It is a mistake to think that the activities of the Church are to be directed only on those outside her pale. She has another more imperative duty to perform namely, building up, purifying, and advancing her own inner life. In the Beatitudes, in the Sermon on the Mount, every blessing has a reference to character. Not until the Beatitudes are ended do we read: "Let your light so shine among men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in heaven." Character precedes power. The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby used to say, "If half the energy and resources which have been turned to Bible societies and missions had been steadily applied to the reform of our own institutions, I cannot but think that we should have been fulfilling a higher duty, and with the blessing of God might have produced more satisfactory results." Dr. Arnold did not, in thus speaking, forget the reflex action of foreign missionary work or undervalue Bible societies and foreign-missionary exertions. He meant that the Church herself and not her work is the great mission to the world, and until she spares neither labour nor sacrifice to exhibit a more perfect representation of that divine life and love without which all she does and suffers is no more than a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal, the result is trifling in comparison.

It is true she must work for the world. First "Be" and then "Do" should be the rule. There was work for the world even in the mediaeval times. The secular world then consisted for the most part of tyrants on the thrones and of fierce barons in their castles. The poor were ground to earth by brutal authority against which they had no protection from the State. In the Church, notwithstanding all abuses, there was law, order, mercy, charity. When men and women, weary of the corruptions and abominations around them, sought rest they found it in her bosom. There was help in the Church for woes for which otherwise there was no helper. When monks and nuns gave bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked, when they visited the sick man upon his bed of languishing and the prisoner in his loathsome dungeon, and told of One who had loved His people unto death and of a Church which was still His messenger upon earth for works such as He had done then the hungry and thirsty and the naked and the sick and the prisoner, moved by the loving voice, touched by the living hand, looked up and said, " We believe in the love of Him whose love is taught us by your love, whose pity by your pity." The representative of the dying and living Lord was fulfilling her commission, and the fruits appeared. The material welfare is also to be taken within the work of the priesthood of the Church. On the mission field Christ’s representatives have to teach men to plough, to reap, to build, to clothe themselves, to read and write and cipher. At home they have to arouse a feeling on behalf of elementary education and light and air and cleanliness and efficient drainage. People say: "Now we understand you. This is practically to promote human welfare, and is far better adapted to human needs than what is called preaching the Gospel." No! there is no opposition here. When work of this kind is done from the Christian motive and is animated by the Christian spirit, it is preaching the Gospel. Our High Priest in heaven, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, healed the sick and fed the multitudes. He would do the same thing now through His people as they carry on this work of priesthood. In His name they are still to help, strengthen, and comfort all. They are to find their joy in taking upon them the sorrows of others, in dying for others that they may live. A heavy responsibility has been incurred by those who have presented to men a narrower idea of priesthood. The people of Christ are to be God’s representatives to a heathen world. To no part of their work are the thoughts of Christians more earnestly turned at the present than to that which bids them "go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations" (St. Matt, 18:19). The Church must be animated by the thought that she is elect not for her own sake, but for the world, that her life must be a life of priesthood in the name of the heavenly Father for the spreading of that kingdom which, bringing men to Christ, brings them into that ideal sphere of the holy, the beautiful, and the loving which as yet has only consummated in the Great High Priest in heaven. The embracing love of God is the historical destiny of man. This historical destiny of the human race is but another expression for the Biblical idea "the tabernacle of God is with men" (Revelation 21:3). In that tabernacle, wide as the world and with its veil rent from top to bottom, the whole Church, when alive to its vocation, is to stand as a ministering priesthood until, in the most extended sense of the term, "all Israel shall be saved." Personal work is to represent a personal Redeemer. From the thought of the work of the glorified Lord it would be seen that many branches of the Church of Christ have a lesson to learn in our day, which, when learned, may be the means of introducing a new era in their history. Let us be thankful that they are learning it. Their Brotherhoods, their Sisterhoods, their "Settlements," the dwelling of God’s workers in the slums to raise the poor, the daily personal contact with hearts often more sad than wicked, and oftenest saddest in their wickedness, the labours unseen by human eye, the sacrifices uncomplained of by those who make them these and other efforts devised by the spirit of love are producing and will produce an effect the extent of which we cannot as yet measure. They are an approach to the idea of the priesthood of the Church.

3. The glorified Lord is to be manifested in the worship of His people. The Liturgy of the Anglican Church is one in which the laity have their share. It is a service of responses. The worship of the Church has always been a common worship. There is the worship in private, which is the Christian’s vital breath and native air. There is family worship, which cannot tolerate that any member of the family be missed from the family in heaven. The Gospel fulfils its noblest mission in hallowing the general relations of family life. In St. Paul’s history of Philippi whole families were gathered into the fold. Lydia and her household, the jailer and all belonging to him, were baptized into Christ. Henceforth the worship of households plays an important part in the divine economy of the Church. As in primeval days the patriarch was the recognised priest of His clan, so in the Christian Church the father of the house is the divinely appointed centre of religious life to his own family. The family religion is the true starting-point, the surest foundation of the religion of cities and dioceses, of nations and empires. The church in the house of Philemon grows into the Church of Colosse; the church in the house of Nymphas becomes the Church of Laodicea; the church in the house of Aquila and Priscilla loses itself in the Church of Ephesus and Rome.

Christians need a common worship. They are not merely individual personalities, each having its own connection with the Head. They are sharers of a common life, and are united to one another by a bond similar to that which unites them to their Lord, and in their Lord to the Father of all. If so, that common worship, which is as much the expression of common life as individual worship is of individual life, is binding on every Christian. It depends in the first instance upon no thought of benefit received or to be received, but on the fact that the Redeemer as Head of the body does not stand alone. He has taken up all His people to Himself, and His glory cannot be thought of without them. Through them and us, then, He fills all things. The service of the Church is almost exclusively joyous. It is one chant, culminating in the Eucharist, the peculiar sacrifice of thanksgiving. It is one effort to set forth " God’s most holy praise," when the Church forgets for the moment her own necessities in contemplating the love which passeth knowledge. In the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper the Church realises to a greater extent than in any other of her ordinances the sacrificial life of her glorified Lord. His life on earth was praise. The more fully the spirit of the Lord becomes her spirit, the more she must feel that the keynote of her worship is not prayer for blessings needed in the future, but adoration and thanksgiving for those that have been made hers already.

4. The glorified Lord is to be made manifest in the confession of His Church. Our Lord came into the world to confess His Father before men, to be a witness to His being and character. There is, indeed, no more characteristic aspect in which our Lord is set before us in the New Testament than that of witnessing. A similar confession and similar witnessing is demanded by the Church when she manifests the Redeemer’s glory and carries on His work. A confession of the Church’s faith is to be made by the whole Church. To maintain that a confession is to be limited to a few, is to destroy its vitality and to doom it to extinction. The few will cease to care for what they are taught to regard as intended for them alone. The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ does not live for the few. She lives for all, and she proclaims One who is the Saviour of all. The confession thus intended for the whole Church must spring from the Church as a whole. St. Paul fixes on the confession which is made to salvation: "If thou confess with thy mouth Jesus is Lord," and "that every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." There should be fixity with regard to the great fact of salvation and freedom to discuss all else.

There is nothing more imperatively demanded of the Church in the present day than that idea of the general priesthood which flows directly from the fact that she lives in Him who is our High Priest in heaven. The idea has been too long associated with periods of unscriptural domination on the part of the clergy, and of ignorance and superstition. In spite of that it is true and fundamental. A clear conception and a bold enunciation of it lies at the very root of all that is most real in the Church’s work. We cannot abandon a position to which we have been divinely called because it has been abused and may be abused again. The aim of true priesthood is not money and station and power. It is love, work, self-sacrifice. The Christian Church has lost much by casting the thought of her priesthood aside. Let us return to the proclamation of it by word and deed. In the previous lectures we have considered how the Holy Spirit has come into the minds of men through the Church, the Body of Christ. The view taken in this course of lectures combines in one the doctrines which have been held in part or else ever-emphasised by various Christian bodies. With the Roman Catholic Church it recognises the important powers of the Christian ministry, and claims for that ministry the functions which belong to it representatively through the Holy Spirit by the breath and com mission of Christ ever since the Resurrection Day. With the school of Dr. Arnold it insists on the personal priesthood of every baptized member of Christ, and in con sequence his and her access in personal devotion to the favour of God through Jesus Christ. But it supplies to both views what is much required, the full acknowledgment of the other part of the double truth namely, that the inherent priesthood of the whole body asserts, in a way that cannot be neglected, the official ministry in its representative priesthood. The organic ministry is requisite to keep up in its full strength and deep needs the priesthood of each member of the whole body. While it acknowledges the authority of Holy Scripture, it admits that God has given to each age the duty of determining the points which it alone has the power of determining.

If the two sides of this great truth were realised in all their strength, many important questions would be solved.

First, the important question of winning back those who have left the Anglican communion, not in consequence of any difference in doctrine or discipline, but through a desire for the fuller recognition of those important truths which the full doctrine of the general priesthood of all the members of the body of Christ brings prominently into view.

Then, secondly, the whole question of non-established churches, as in the Colonies and in the mission field, is more easily seen when both parts of the twofold truth are fully recognised. In such churches, where the State or long custom does not form a factor in the problem, the sacred spiritual authority of the whole Church, within due and scriptural limits, is more clearly seen and authorised. Even in churches established by law a reflected light is found for the exhibition and success in practice of this primitive truth in sister and daughter churches. As we consider in conclusion the personal priesthood of every single Christian, by which he has direct access to God, two elements here meet us: (1) the secret operation of the Holy Spirit, and (2) that which belongs to sacramental efficacy.

Both are necessary to the perfection of each member of the body of Christ. In baptism the outwardly administered gift is given and received. The soul is placed in a covenant relation to God. The germ may be long latent, and yet by no means lost. It awaits faith and repentance. But if a soul utterly profanes God’s grace it will be cut off. Therefore the preaching of faith and repentance is necessary to waken up personal faith and conscious repentance. As the sap cannot flow from a tree to a branch that by decay has become incapable of receiving it, so the choicest graces cannot reach the soul which is not in a fit condition to receive them. In Holy Communion it is only those who rightly, duly, and with faith receive after a spiritual manner the body and blood of Christ that are strengthened and refreshed. So also in public prayer: here our faith must give sincerity and voice to confession, and proving of heart to prayer, reality to repentance, or else the united prayers of the Church are but like a tinkling cymbal. The absolution pronounced by the ministry acts like drops of water which flow off a hardened rock to the wet soil of a neighbouring heart, if unaccompanied by personal assimilation.

Besides this personal sincerity needed to enjoy the graces of the body through its authorised channels, each Christian possesses a distinct priesthood of his own, which is at once part of the universal priesthood, and is for himself a sufficient right of admission to the mercy of God through Christ. In the power of this priesthood he cultivates a perfect faith. In deep self-reliance he knits himself body and soul altogether perfectly to God. He finds strength sufficient to support him under earthly trouble, giving him cheerfulness, calmness, and a sense of the presence of God through pain and illness to the last ray of consciousness and the gates of the grave. It is his own. It is the gift of God to the separate soul of His child on earth. He possesses it alone. It is heaven in anticipation! It makes things hoped for substantial to his soul. It makes evident things not seen. In personal priesthood he has a right to the Holy Scriptures. It is a cruel overthrow of the fundamental principles of the doctrine of Christ which would withhold, and which has withheld, the life-giving Word of God from any portion of the people of God. If any be ignorant he is to be taught, that he may discern things more excellent and the true balance of the varying truths in God’s revelation. But to withhold from him the Bible is to deprive him of the very means by which he may learn how to do the service which is due from every baptized member of Christ’s Body. These truths are his to ponder, to hide within his heart, that he may not sin; to repeat when he walks by the way, when he lies upon his bed, and when he wakes up. They are as necessary to his spiritual life as the air to breathing. He possesses all the faith once for all de livered unto the saints the doctrines of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is his duty to defend it from attack. It may not be his duty to preach, but his aid is a help the authorised clergy cannot spare or do without. For himself, his children, and those who come under his influence his own sacred and well-grounded faith is of a value that cannot be exaggerated, and its absence is a heavy and dangerous loss. In his own personal priesthood he can go to God in repentance and hearty confession of sin. He can lay open his con science before God, confessing sins which no man knows or need know. He may be sure that God accepts his filial confession. He has a right in Christ to the absolute assurance of forgiveness in so far as his repentance is real and his confession true. He does not need that any man should necessarily come between God and his own soul in order to obtain for him the pardon and peace which are promised to faithful confessions: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness " (1 St. John i. 9). In the power of his personal priesthood he can pray to his Father in secret, and his Father will not fail to give him for Christ’s sake the answer best for him: " Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened " (St. Matthew 7:7-8). In the power of personal priesthood the boy may pray in the critical temptations of school life; the young man in the searching trials of mind and body in the freshness of all his powers; the man in the stern realities of life; the old man with the nearing prospect of the grave. All are admitted in access to the Father; all are accepted in the Beloved.

He can make also effectual intercession for others. Very strong is the praying of a righteous man in its working! The father for his family, the mother for her girls and boys; friends asking the prayers of friends; prayers of members of the Church for all who bear rule in the Church. Here is a mighty network of intercessory prayer, an invisible force of incalculable strength which brings down rich and varied blessings from God. The single soul of the Christian in his place in the body of Christ is a room in the temple of God wherein His sacred presence dwelleth. In saying this I do not undervalue the blessing the individual Christian receives from the graces granted to the general body. As baptism is the spring of personal priesthood, so holy communion is the perpetual brook by the wayside.

Thus is the personal priesthood supplied, invigorated, and increased. In the light, however, in which we are regarding them at this moment, minister and layman are the same. All outer differences have fallen off for the time for him who is on his knees before God, as he prays in private and opens his soul to the eyes of his Maker. No external differences go with him into the immediate presence of the Most High. He comes as a member of Christ, God’s own well-beloved child in Christ, whose heart is the dwelling of the Holy Spirit, from whose soul the Holy Spirit cries aloud, where the loving Father and His Son make their abode.

If all this be true, do we not need one and all to rise to a much loftier and truer sense of our position and the responsibilities involved? All need it; not only the clergy, but the laity. The responsibility which should belong to all alike is thrown as a professional burden on the clergy. The lay people are taught to think themselves outside the framework of the Spirit-inspired Church. They have forgotten that all the joints and sinews, having nourishment and knit together, must increase with the in crease of God. As we consider the advantages arising from the doctrine of the priesthood of the laity we find there are at least five points which demand our attention. The first is, that it removes the dangerous notion that there is one rule of holiness for the minister of the Church of Christ and another for the layman. The expression so often used in the Epistle of St. Paul teaches a different lesson namely, that all are called unto holiness. The idea that the divine rule of the Gospel does not bind all is dangerous and novel. The apostle appeals to the whole Church as " elect " that is, chosen for service and for holiness. It is often taken for granted that there is a dangerous chasm between the standard of life required of the clergy and that of the laity. This is quite opposed to the ideal of the Primitive Church. The words in the Sermon on the Mount were addressed to all; if to the apostles, to the apostles as disciples first and leaders afterwards not so much examples to the flock as types of the faithful. "We are mistaken," says Tertullian, "if we think that what is not allowed to ministers is allowed to laymen." The idea of personal holiness, purity, and devotion to God’s service was included in the idea of priesthood in the Old Testament, and is transferred to the members of the spiritual Israel now. To insist on the general priesthood of Christians is thus to emphasise the nearness of each Christian to God, and the thought of special fitness for the service. The second thought is the recognition of each Christian as having his place, and that an honoured one, in the organisation viewed in its entirety. It removes the tendency to despondency and feeling of isolation to be assured that each has his place and his part to play. In this only can his interest be assured and loyalty maintained. His place and his part should be recognised and valued. Without entering into the intrinsic value of the work done, it leads to intelligent interest and fills the mind with the highest objects of thought, viz. the relation of the soul to God, and the work of the church for God. The wisest way to make a man interested is to give him work to do.

Thirdly, when we think of the need of workers in training, shepherding, and rescuing souls, the assistance of the laity is at once seen to be a necessary adjunct in the united work of the Church. The non-ministerial class has by its very position a powerful influence of its own. The words of a layman have special weight as coming from a layman to a layman, a force of experience, a force of conviction, an absence of any suspicion of mere professional teaching or advice necessitated by the official position held. We need most intensely the confirmation given to the words of the official teacher by the corroboration of good and consistent laymen.

Fourthly, when we come to the practical work of the Church we find that the duties cast on the clergy by the withdrawal of the laity from the work of the Church are overwhelming.

There is much work done by the clergy which is entirely the work of laymen. The apostolic rule that the apostles should not serve tables, but reserve themselves for the ministry of the Word and prayer, and the consequent appointment of the deacons, may be extended to all branches of ecclesiastical finance. This work can best be done as a labour of love in conjunction with the ordained clergy. It can be done more efficiently, rapidly, and easily by the laity. The supply of the material requisite for public worship and secular and religious education ought to have an interest for and supply a useful work to the skilled and business-like laity. Too often matters of mere maintenance of the fabric and materials necessary for the teaching of religion are regarded in some way as the "parson’s job." This causes a great loss to the Christian community and is an unnecessary strain on the clergy. The lack which every joint supplieth mentioned by St. Paul surely comes in here with special application. In such useful and indispensable labours the layman is serving God with the gifts bestowed upon him. In the Church of Ireland such matters as finance, investments, income and clerical superannuation have been most successfully dealt with by devoted laymen, who have achieved great results and thereby advanced God’s Kingdom.

Fifthly, when we come to counsel as to religious matters and doctrine the assistance of the layman is most important. He brings a non-professional common-sense to matters which at times assume an unreal importance in the minds of the professional class, and often contributes sage, calm, and disinterested advice. Even in doctrinal matters, such minds are of great importance. To take as an analogy our courts of justice twelve men of unbiassed minds are welcomed to give an opinion as to matters of fact, even though they have not given their minds to deep legal questions. The Christian layman, well read and deeply imbued with the general teaching of God’s Word, may often see the countervailing value of the broad essential virtues of peace and charity and godliness and edification, and thereby assist in preventing one-sided and over-strained application of some truths which have in their own place great value and importance. In legislation, from Cyprian’s time down, it is the laity who have been on the side of strictness and in matters of discipline have been conservative. If discipline is ever to be restored to the Christian Church, if we are to trust history, allies are to be relied upon by calling in the counsels of the laity. For many years I have felt that the great spiritual danger of our times was the one-sidedness of the views which spiritual people take about the constitution of the Church. They too often think themselves free from their share in the powers of the Church, and from their responsibility in using them. I have felt deeply that the recognition of the great doctrine of the collective priesthood of the entire body, and with it the separate personal priesthood of each member of the body, is essential to the well-being of all. It would check the exaggeration of one-sided doctrine in either direction. It would settle various important questions which arise as the Church develops under new and varying conditions and press for solution. The strength of the future Anglican Communion and of the United Kingdom as a Christian nation depends on each man and woman acknowledging, and, by the grace of God, acting up to, the deep responsibility of their own real personal priesthood in the collective priesthood of the whole body of Christ. Our common priesthood causes us to act as a united body in which we work with the full power of the Holy Spirit, who, dwelling in the Church as the soul dwelleth in the body, giveth to every man severally as He willeth "for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we may be no longer children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, after the wiles of error; but speaking truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him, which is the head, even Christ; from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love."