第50章 THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION(10)

"In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands of intense and conservative men.These last--narrow, fearful, and suspicious--have sought in every age to save the precious gift of religion by putting it into a prison of formulae and asseverations.Bear that in mind when you are pressed to definition.It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea.But they have sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing, to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though it would otherwise corrupt.So they have lost God and fallen into endless differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about insignificant things.They have divided religion between this creed and teacher and that.The corruption of the best is the worst, said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and especially this Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by the fussings and false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary.There is no lie so bad as a stale disfigured truth.There is no heresy so damnable as a narrow orthodoxy.All religious associations carry this danger of the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that divides and betrays.Beware of that danger.Do not imagine, because you are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I preside here in this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see about you in coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation, that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King.

You enter that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it.

This place, this church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a fastness but a door.

"I could quote you a score of instances to establish that this simple universalism was also the teaching of Christ.But now Iwill only remind you that it was Mary who went to her lord simply, who was commended, and not Martha who troubled about many things.Learn from the Mary of Faith and not from these Marthas of the Creeds.Let us abandon the presumptions of an ignorant past.The perfection of doctrine is not for finite men.Give yourselves to God.Give yourselves to God.Not to churches and uses, but to God.To God simply.He is the first word of religion and the last.He is Alpha; he is Omega.Epitelesei; it is He who will finish the good work begun."The bishop ended his address in a vivid silence.Then he began his interrogation.

"Do you here, in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism; ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons, and acknowledging yourselves--"He stopped short.The next words were: "bound to believe and do all those things, which your Godfathers and Godmothers then undertook for you."He could not stand those words.He hesitated, and then substituted: "acknowledge yourselves to be the true servants of the one God, who is the Lord of Mankind?"For a moment silence hung in the cathedral.Then one voice, a boy's voice, led a ragged response."I do."Then the bishop: "Our help is in the Name of the Lord."The congregation answered doubtfully, with a glance at its prayer books: "Who hath made heaven and earth."The bishop: "Blessed be the name of the Lord."The congregation said with returning confidence: "Henceforth, world without end."(12)

Before his second address the bishop had to listen to Veni Creator Spiritus, in its English form, and it seemed to him the worst of all possible hymns.Its defects became monstrously exaggerated to his hypersensitive mind.It impressed him in its Englished travesty as a grotesque, as a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns, and in truth it does stick out most awkward feet, it misses its accusatives, it catches absurdly upon points of abstruse doctrine.The great Angel stood motionless and ironical at the bishop's elbow while it was being sung."Your church," he seemed to say.

"We must end this sort of thing," whispered the bishop."We must end this sort of thing--absolutely." He glanced at the faces of the singers, and it became beyond all other things urgent, that he should lift them once for all above the sectarian dogmatism of that hymn to a simple vision of God's light....

He roused himself to the touching business of the laying on of hands.While he did so the prepared substance of his second address was running through his mind.The following prayer and collects he read without difficulty, and so came to his second address.His disposition at first was explanatory.

"When I spoke to you just now," he began, "I fell unintentionally into the use of a Greek word, epitelesei.It was written to me in a letter from a friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to you.This letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and so these two words are very much in my mind.The former one was taken from the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, 'He will complete the work begun'; the one I have now in mind comes from the Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei--or, to be fuller, epiphausei soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us.And this is very much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which seemed so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled dawn.God is at hand.