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choose, but moving steadily, and that not by the shaping of circumstances, but by the guiding of the Holy Ghost, toward that form and character which, having once taken on, it has now retained, whatever temporary obscuration of its primitive character or degradation of its high purpose may have befallen it, for well-nigh twenty centuries. And therefore
we are here to disown the theory that the organic form of ChrisChurch holds it and has perpetuated it, is merely the development and outcome of civil and secular institutions, amid which it originally found itself, any more than the Atonement on Calvary was the outcome of the Platonic or
tianity, as the Catholic
Aristotelian philosophies. Points of resemblance, points of contact, points of ideneven, we may own, here and there, it may be, in the one as in the others; but we are here to-day, if I at all understand the purpose of our coming, to affirm that yonder volume does not more truly declare to us the means of our salvation than it declares and defines that one preeminent agency, the CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD, with its inspired message and its divinely instituted sacraments, and divinely appointed threefold ministry, as the visible agency and instrument by which that salvation is to be made known to men. And here, at any rate, whatever may be proper elsewhere, we are not called upon to go beyond this. How truly a human body may be so designated which is more or less maimed or mutilated is a question which theology may not find it easier to answer in one domain than science in another. But in an age when there is so much invertebrate belief, and when the tone of mutual complacency is so great that one man's deliro (I dream) is as good as another man's credo (I believe), it is as well in connection with such an occasion as this to understand the ground upon which we stand, and the point from which we set out. The cause of the reunion of Christendom will be greatly forwarded by the kindly temper which strives to understand, and scorns to misrepresent others; but it will not be helped by the mistaken amiability which seeks to misinterpret or consents to misrepresent ourselves. I have said this much, and have endeavored to say it with utmost plainness, beBut I have done cause, unless I am mistaken, the exigency of the hour demands it. so mainly because it opens the way to that larger view of our text and of this occasion to which, if possible, we should ascend. (a) For, first of all, and plainly enough, it belongs to us to remember on such an occasion as this that there is a past, and that we cannot divorce ourselves from it. Interesting and impressive as even the coldest criticism would be apt to own the service in which we are now engaged, neither its impressiveness nor its intrinsic appropriateness is the reason for our observance of those solemn features which did not originate, extemporize, or invent them. Their claim upon compose it. us, first of all, resides in this: that they are a part of that venerable and scriptural inheritance of which God has put us in trust. In an age which, with its smart sciolism, considers itself competent to invent a method for every emergency, and extemporize a function for every most august solemnity, it is enough for us that we are here engaged in doing what "our fathers did aforetime." That law of historic continuity which Christ in His earlier ministry so consistently and invariably emphasized, from the day when, at His home in Nazareth, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day to those closing hours when, on the eve of His crucifixion, He made ready to keep the Passover with His disciples, is still the Church's truest wisdom, as it is daily coming more and more plainly to be seen to be an essential element of her inmost strength. The evolution of the Church, like the evolution of the highest forms of physical and intellectual life, must forever be along those h'nes which keep her present in close and vascular connection with her past. No more tragic lesson has been taught to Christendom than that which salutes us, in this land and age, in the manifold and mutually destructive divisions of that Christendom, as to the folly are set, in a generation of ignorant and and madness of the defiance of that law. audacious departures from primitive faith and practice, to say, and to say it over and are set to affirm that, howsoever it may have over again, "the old is better." been caricatured, overstated, or misunderstood, there is a doctrine of Apostolic succession in teaching, in ministry, in fellowship, and that we are to guard it and perpetuate it. Preeminent as are the truths of Christ's personal relation to the personal soul, we may not forget that He has chosen to reveal and proclaim them through an agency which binds those souls to one another and to Him in the great as well as "good estate of the Catholic Church." And this it is our bounden duty to remember and to affirm, not less but more, because it is to many an unwelcome and unnecessary affirmation, and one that, only late and slowly, men are coming to own and accept. But when we have done this duty, we are not to leave the other duty undone, and tity,
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6-Pt.
No.
31, solid]
Qfyt Plimpton
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