Greatest
Thing in the
World
I
Saw no Temple
There
By:
Henry Drummond
“I
Saw
no Church there,” said John.
Nor is there any note of surprise
as he marks the omission of what
one half of Christendom would
have considered the first
essential. For beside the type of
religion he had learned from
Christ, the Church type —the
merely Church type—is an
elaborate evasion. What have the
pomp and circumstance, the
fashion and the form, the
vestures and the postures, to do
with Jesus of Nazareth?
At a stage
in personal development. and for
a certain type of mind, such
things may have a place.
But when
mistaken for Christianity, no
matter how they aid it, or in
what measure they conserve it,
they defraud the souls of men,
and rob humanity of its dues. It
is because to large masses of
people Christianity has become
synonymous with a Temple service
that other large masses of people
decline to touch it. It is a
mistake to suppose that the
working classes of this country
are opposed to Christianity. No
man can ever be opposed to
Christianity who knows what it
really is.
The working
men would still follow Christ if
He came among them. As a matter
of fact they do follow anyone,
preacher or layman, in pulpit or
on platform, who is the least
like Him. But what they cannot
follow, and must evermore live
outside of, is a worship which
ends with the worshipper, a
religion expressed only in
ceremony, and a faith unrelated
to life.
Perhaps the
most dismal fact of history is
the failure of the great
organized bodies of
ecclesiasticism to understand the
simple genius of Christ’s
religion. Whatever the best in
the Churches of all time may have
thought of the life and religion
of Christ, taken as a whole they
have succeeded in leaving upon
the mind of a large portion of
the world an impression of
Christianity which is the direct
opposite ofthe reality.
Down to the
present hour almost whole nations
in Europe live, worship, and die
under the belief that Christ is
an ecclesiastical Christ,
religion the sum of all the
Churches’ observances, and
faith an adhesion to the
Churches’ creeds. I do not
apportion blame; I simply record
the fact.
Everything
that the spiritual and temporal
authority of man could do has
been done— done in ignorance
of the true nature of
Christianity—to dislodge the
religion of Christ from its
natural home in the heart of
Humanity. In many lands the
Churches have literally stolen
Christ from the people; they have
made the Son of Man the Priest of
an Order; they have taken
Christianity from the City and
imprisoned it behind altar rails;
they have withdrawn it from the
national life and doled it out to
the few who pay to keep the
unconscious deception
up.
Do not do
the Church, the true Church at
least, the injustice to think
that she does not know all this.
Nowhere, not even in the fiercest
secular press, is there more
exposure of this danger, more
indignation at its continuance,
than in many of the Churches of
today.
The protest
against the confusion of
Christianity with the Church is
the most threadbare of pulpit
themes. Before the University of
Oxford, from the pulpit of St.
Mary’s, these words were
lately spoken: “If it is
strange that the Church of the
darker ages should have needed so
bitter a lesson (the actual
demolition of their churches), is
it not ten times stranger still
that the Church of the days of
greater enlightenment should be
found again making the chief part
of its business the organizing of
the modes of worship; that the
largest efforts which are owned
as the efforts of the Church are
made for the establishment and
maintenance of worship; that our
chief controversies relate to the
teaching and the ministry of a
system designed primarily, if not
exclusively, for worship; that
even the fancies and the
refinements of such a system
divide us; that the breach
between things secular and things
religious grows wider instead of
their being made to blend into
one; and that the vast and
fruitful spaces of the actual
life of mankind lie still so
largely without the gates?
The old
Jerusalem was all temple. The
mediaeval Church was all temple.
But the ideal of the new
Jerusalem was—no temple, but
a God-inhabited society. Are we
not reversing this ideal in an
age when the church still means
in so many mouths the clergy,
instead of meaning the Christian
society, and when nine men are
striving to get men to go to
church for one who is striving to
make men realize that they
themselves are the
Church?”
Yet even
with words so strong as these
echoing daily from Protestant
pulpits the superstition reigns
in all but unbroken power. And
everywhere still men are found
confounding the spectacular
services of a Church, the
vicarious religion of a priest,
and the traditional belief in a
creed, with the living religion
of the Son of Man.
“I saw
no Temple there”—the
future City will be a City
without a Church. Ponder that
fact, realize the temporariness
of the Church, then—go and
build one. Do not imagine,
because all this has been said,
that I mean to depreciate the
Church. On the contrary, if it
were mine to build a City, a City
where all life should be
religious, and all men destined
to become members of the Body of
Christ, the first stone I should
lay there would be the
foundation-stone of a Church
Why?
Because, among other reasons, the
product which the Church on the
whole best helps to develop, and
in the largest quantity, is that
which is most needed by the
City.
For the
present, and for a long time to
come, the manufactory of good
men, the nursery of the forces
which are to redeem the City,
will in the main be found to be
some more or less formal, more or
less imperfect, Christian Church.
Here and there an unchurched soul
may stir the multitudes to lofty
deeds; isolated men; strong
enough to preserve their souls
apart from the Church, but
shortsighted enough perhaps to
fail to see that others cannot,
may set high examples and
stimulate to national reforms.
But for the
rank and file of us, made of such
stuff as we are made of, the
steady pressures of fixed
institutions, the regular diets
of a common worship, and the
education of public Christian
teaching are too obvious
safeguards of spiritual culture
to be set aside. Even Renan
declares his conviction that
“Beyond the family and
outside the State, man has need
of the Church . . . Civil
society, whether it calls itself
a commune, a canton, or a
province, a state, or fatherland,
has many duties towards the
improvement of the individual;
but what it does is necessarily
limited.
The family
ought to do much more, but often
it is insufficient; sometimes it
is wanting altogether. The
association created in the name
of moral principle can alone give
to every man coming into this
world a bond which unites him
with the past, duties as to the
future, examples to follow, a
heritage to receive and to
transmit, and a tradition of
devotion to continue.” Apart
altogether from the quality of
its contribution to society, in
the mere quantity of the work it
turns out it stands alone.
Even for
social purposes the Church is by
far the greatest Employment
Bureau in the world. And the man
who, seeing where it falls short,
withholds on that account his
witness to its usefulness, is a
traitor to history and to
fact.
“The
Church,” as the preacher
whom I have already quoted, most
truly adds, “is a society
which tends to embrace the whole
life of mankind, to bind all
their relations together by a
Divine sanction. As such, it
blends naturally with the
institutions of common
life—those institutions
which, because they are natural
and necessary, are therefore
Divine.
What it
aims at is not the recognition by
the nation of a worshipping body,
governed by the ministers of
public worship, which calls
itself the Church, but that the
nation and all classes in it
should act upon Christian
principle, that laws should be
made in Christ’s spirit of
justice, that the relations of
the powers of the state should be
maintained on a basis of
Christian equity, that all public
acts should be done in
Christ’s spirit, and with
mutual forbearance, that the
spirit of Christian charity
should be spread through all
ranks and orders of the people.
The Church
will maintain public worship as
one of the greatest supports of a
Christian public life; but it
will always remember that the
true service is a life of
devotion to God and man far more
than the common utterance of
prayer.” I have said that
were it mine to build a City, the
first stone I should lay there
would be the foundation-stone of
a Church. But if it were mine to
preach the first sermon in that
Church, I should choose as the
text, “I saw no Church
therein.” I should tell the
people that the great use of the
Church is to help men to do
without it As the old
ecclesiastical term has it,
Church services are
“diets” of worship.
They are
meals. All who are hungry will
take them, and, if they are wise,
regularly. But no workman is paid
for his meals. He is paid for the
work he does in the strength of
them. No Christian is paid for
going to Church. He goes there
for a meal, for strength from God
and from his fellow-worshippers
to do the work of life
—which is the work of
Christ.
The Church
is a Divine institution because
it is so very human an
institution. As a channel of
nourishment, as a stimulus to
holy deeds, as a link with all
holy lives, let all men use it,
and to the utmost of their
opportunity. But by all that they
know of Christ or care for man,
let them beware of mistaking its
services for Christianity. What
Church services really express is
the want of Christianity. And
when that which is perfect in
Christianity is come, all this,
as the mere passing stay and
scaffolding of struggling souls,
must vanish away.
If the
masses who never go to Church
only knew that the Churches were
the mute expression of a
Christian’s wants and not
the self-advertisement of his
sanctity, they would have more
respectful words for Churches.
But they have never learned this.
And the result in their case of
confounding religion with the
Church is even more serious than
in the case of the professing
Christian.
When they
break with the Church it means to
them a break with all religion.
As things are it could scarce be
otherwise. With the Church in
ceaseless evidence before their
eyes as the acknowledged
custodian of Christianity; with
actual stone and lime in every
street representing the place
where religion dwells; with a
professional class moving out and
in among them, holding in their
hands the souls of men, and
almost the keys of
Heaven—how is it possible
that those who turn their backs
on all this should not feel
outcast from the Church’s
God? It is not possible.
Without a
murmur, yet with results to
themselves most disastrous and
pathetic, multitudes accept this
false dividing-line and number
themselves as excommunicate from
all good. The masses will never
return to the Church till its
true relation to the City is more
defined. And they can never have
that most real life of theirs
made religious so long as they
rule themselves out of court on
the ground that they have broken
with ecclesiastical forms. The
life of the masses is the most
real of all lives. It is full of
religious possibilities.
Every
movement of it and every moment
of it might become of supreme
religious value, might hold a
continuous spiritual discipline,
might perpetuate, and that in
most natural ways, a moral
influence which should pervade
all Cities and all States. But
they must first be taught what
Christianity really is, and learn
to distinguish between religion
and the Church. After that, if
they be taught their lesson well,
they will return to honor
both.
Our fathers
made much of “meetness”
for Heaven. By prayer and
fasting, by self-examination and
meditation they sought to fit
themselves “for the
inheritance of the saints in
light.” Important beyond
measure in their fitting place
are these exercises of the soul.
But whether alone they fit men
for the inheritance of the saints
depends on what a saint is.
If a saint
is a devotee and not a citizen,
if Heaven is a cathedral and not
a City, then these things do fit
for Heaven. But if life means
action, and Heaven service; if
spiritual graces are acquired for
use and not for ornament, then
devotional forms have a deeper
function. The Puritan preachers
were wont to tell their people to
“practise dying.” Yes;
but what is dying? It is going to
a City. And what is required of
those who would go to a City? The
practice of Citizenship—the
due employment of the unselfish
talents, the development of
public spirit, the payment of the
full tax to the great
brotherhood, the subordination of
personal aims to the common good.
And where are these to be
learned? Here; in Cities here.
There is no
other way to learn them. There is
no Heaven to those who have not
learned them.
No Church
however holy, no priest however
earnest, no book however sacred,
can transfer to any human
character the capacities of
Citizenship—those capacities
which in the very nature of
things are necessities to those
who would live in the kingdom of
God. The only preparation which
multitudes seem to make for
Heaven is for its Judgment Bar.
What
will they do in its streets?
What
have they learned of Citizenship?
What
have they practised of love?
How like
are they to its Lord?
To
“practise dying” is to
practise living. Earth is the
rehearsal for Heaven. The eternal
beyond is the eternal here. The
street-life, the home-life, the
business-life, the City-life in
all the varied range of its
activity, are an apprenticeship
for the City of God. There is no
other apprenticeship for it. To
know how to serve Christ in these
is to “practise
dying.”
To move
among the people on the common
street; to meet them in the
marketplace on equal terms; to
live among them not as saint or
monk, but as brother-man with
brother-man; to serve God not
with form or ritual, but in the
free impulse of a soul; to bear
the burdens of society and
relieve its needs; to carry on
the multitudinous activities of
the City—social, commercial,
political, philanthropic—in
Christ’s spirit and for His
ends: this is the religion of the
Son of Man, and the only meetness
for Heaven which has much reality
in it.
No; the
Church with all its splendid
equipment, the cloister with all
its holy opportunity, are not the
final instruments for fitting men
for Heaven. The City, in many of
its functions, is a greater
Church than the Church.
It is amid
the whirr of its machinery and in
the discipline of its life that
the souls of men are really made.
How great its opportunity is we
are few of us aware. It is such
slow work getting better, the
daily round is so very common,
our ideas of a heavenly life are
so unreal and mystical that even
when the highest Heaven lies all
around us, when we might touch
it, and dwell in it every day we
live, we almost fail to see that
it is there.
The Heaven
of our childhood, the spectacular
Heaven, the Heaven which is a
place, sodominates thought even
in our maturer years, that we are
slow to learn the fuller truth
that Heaven is a state.
But John,
who is responsible before all
other teachers for the dramatic
view of Heaven, has not failed in
this very allegory to proclaim
the further lesson. Having
brought all his scenery upon the
stage and pictured a material
Heaven of almost unimaginable
splendour, the seer turns aside
before he closes for a revelation
of a profounder kind.
Within the
Heavenly City he opens the gate
of an inner Heaven. It is the
spiritual Heaven—the Heaven
of those who serve. With two
flashes of his pen he tells the
Citizens of God all that they
will ever need or care to know as
to what Heaven really means.
“His servants shall serve
Him; and they shall see His Face;
and His Character shall be
written on their
characters.”
They shall
see His Face. Where? In the City.
When? In Eternity?
No;
tomorrow. Those who serve in any
City cannot help continually
seeing Christ. He is there with
them. He is there before them.
They cannot but meet. No gentle
word is ever spoken that
Christ’s voice does not also
speak; no meek deed is ever done
that the unsummoned Vision does
not there and then appear. Who
so, in whatsoever place,
receiveth a little child in My
name receiveth Me.
This is how
men get to know God—by doing
His will. And there is no other
way. And this is how men become
like God; how God’s
character becomes written upon
men’s characters.
Acts react
upon souls. Good acts make good
men; just acts, just men; kind
acts, kind men; divine acts,
divine men. And there is no other
way of becoming good, just, kind,
divine. And there is no Heaven
for those who have not become
these. For these are
Heaven.
When
John’s Heaven faded from his
sight, and the prophet woke to
the desert waste of Patmos, did
he grudge to exchange the Heaven
of his dream for the common tasks
around him?
Was he not
glad to be alive, and there?
And would
he not straightway go to the
City, to whatever struggling
multitude his prison-rock held,
if so be that he might prove his
dream and among them see His
Face?
Traveler to
God’s last City, be glad
that you are alive. Be thankful
for the City at your door and for
the chance to build its walls a
little nearer Heaven before you
go.
Pray for
yet a little while to redeem the
wasted years. And week by week as
you go forth from worship, and
day by day as you awake to face
this great and needy world, learn
to “seek a City” there,
and in the service of its
neediest citizen find
Heaven.
Christian
books
|
