maintained, the due proportion and proper balance between silence with God and service to men. Worship and work were inseparably bound together in His consciousness of His divine relationship and His human mission.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE PERIL OF ORDERS

HE human mind is ever prone to misuse

THE

the great gifts of God. Out of this disposition has grown the idol-worship of the world. The revelation, the instrument, the means, becomes an end itself. The Jews came to worship their temple and their law, and then their idols, and lost the vision of God. Until rebuked and forbidden by them, the superstitious barbarians of Lycaonia would fain have worshipped the apostles. The Roman Church has deified the Virgin, and exalted the pope to a place almost co-equal with Christ. Protestants at times have made the letter of Scripture the pope of Protestantism.

And what have we done? We have empha

sised the necessity for valid and regular orders. We have exalted the sacramental system of the Church. We have capitalised "The Church." We have glorified the ritual of our worship. We have created what Billy Sunday asserts is the best governed and ordered Church in Christendom. In all this we cannot be fairly charged with having done amiss. But our course has been, and still is, beset with perils. We have not always been mindful of them. We are in constant danger of becoming unmindful of them. The danger lies in making an end of what God ordained to be a means to an end. We constantly face the peril of becoming slaves to the system that was ordained to make men free.

The peril does not present itself especially to the priestly mind. The danger is not so much that he will become a materialist, though he sometimes does, but that the laity will not see through the form and system to the spiritual verities of which it is intended to be, and really is, the sign and symbol. The form and

ritual, which is intended to project the soul into the spiritual realm, is in danger of arresting the attention and of enchaining the soul to the over-emphasised symbol. The priest has used the organisation in a way to make him recognise it as an organism into which he is incorporated. He has found every form, and institution, and interpretation of his order, and sacramental theory, a means of blessing vital and deeply spiritual for himself. He magnifies the importance of form, he preaches the Church persistently, he proclaims as indispensable his interpretation of the ordinal, and holds up sacrament to the gaze of the people. All this the priest may do with personal, conscious reverence, and yet be unmindful of the perils which beset his people by reason of his emphasis upon sign and symbol, and visible sacrament, and the ordered succession, and the Holy Church.

the

The peril lies in the danger that the people will not see through and beyond. Their faith is in peril of being arrested by their senses. It is liable to stop short. It is prone to substitute the

sign for the thing signified. Worship then becomes formal. Materialism dominates spirituality. The organisation, magnified and glorified, then assumes a disproportionate place in the lay consciousness. He swears by the Church, but he swears. He bows low before the altar, but he bows lower in the house of Rimmon, and in the temples of Mammon. He feels the glow of dim religious lights, and a certain sense of æsthetic devotion, and a dim consciousness of a pleasing spiritual warmth. He has touched the garment of Christ. That Christ also by many thousands is touched we know full well. But that there are perils here we know full well also, and they need to be recognised and constantly guarded against.

Then, too, we are liable to put our trust in the power, and in what we regard as the potent perfection, of the organisation. Conscious of our sure and certain incorporation into the Church; conscious of its dignity, its order, its inherent worth, we are prone to delude ourselves with the idea that this in itself is sufficient. Men