Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

If we survey the whole world at the coming of Christ, we may say that the institution of bloody sacrifice is the most striking and characteristic fact to be found in it. This conclusion will result in the mind if four things be noted which are therein bound up together. The first of these is its specific character; for surely the ceremonial of sacrifice, as above described, deserves this title, if anything ever did. It is a very marked and peculiar institution, conveying an ineffaceable sense of guilt in those who practise it, and a quite singular manner of detaching from themselves the effects of that guilt. Secondly, it is found everywhere; without sacrifice no religious worship is complete; its general diffusion has with reason been alleged as a proof of its true origin and deep meaning. Were it only found in single or in rude nations, it might have been attributed to rude and barbarous conceptions; but all nations had it, and the most civilised offered it in the greatest profusion. Thirdly, it had the most astonishingly pervading influence; from the top to the bottom of the social scale it ruled all; the king made it the support of his throne; the father of the family applied it to his children; bride and bridegroom were joined together in its name; and warring nations made peace in the blood of the sacrificed victim. Fourthly, the three notes just given are indefinitely heightened in their force when we consider that the institution, far from being of itself in accordance with man’s reason, is quite opposed to it. Reason does indeed suggest that the fruits of the earth should be offered in mark of honour, gratitude, and dependence to that Almighty Lord by whose gift alone they are received; but reason of itself, far from suggesting, flies back from the notion that the Giver of life should accept as a propitiatory offering from His creature the blood of animals, in which, according to the general sense of antiquity, their life itself consisted. That this blood should be poured out, and sprinkled on those present as an act of religious faith; that it should be accompanied by words expressing adoration, thanksgiving, and petition; and further, that it should be considered to remove guilt, – the whole of this forms a conception so alien from reason, that he who reflects upon it is driven to the conclusion of a positive enactment, bearing in it a mysterious truth, which it was of the utmost importance for man to know, to bear in mind, to practise, and not to forget. And if we put together these four things, the specific character of the bloody sacrifice, its universality, its pervading influence, and the token of unreason, apart, that is, from the significance of a deep mystery, which rests upon it, we must feel that there is nothing in the constitution of the world before our Saviour’s time more worthy of attention than this. There is no solution of it to be found but that of St. Augustine, “that the immolation of blood, carrying an announcement of the future, testified from the beginning of the human race the Passion of the Mediator that was to be.”

But there is likewise a series of portentous facts, bearing upon the institution of bloody sacrifice, which runs through all human history. This is the offering of human sacrifices in expiation of guilt, or to ward off calamities. The religious ideas which lie at the bottom of this are, that as life is a gift of God to man on the condition that he fulfils God’s commands, every sinner has thereby forfeited his life. The rule of inexorable justice is set forth in strongest language by the Greek tragedians, as when Æschylus says, “It abides, while Jove abides through the series of ages, that he who has done a deed shall suffer for it. It is an ordinance.”⁹⁴ But as all men stand in a real communion of life to each other, and as members of one living whole are bound in one responsibility to the Godhead, the idea also prevailed that one man’s life could be given for another’s; that one might offer himself in expiation for another, and the willing sacrifice of the innocent was esteemed to have the more power in proportion as the vicarious will of the offerer was pure, and therefore acceptable to the gods: “For I think that a single soul performing this expiation would suffice for a thousand, if it be there with good-will,” says Œdipus in Sophocles. So kings offer themselves for their people; so the royal virgin gains for the host with her blood prosperous winds. But from such acts of self-devotion, freely performed, we proceed to a further step, in which men are sacrificed against their will. At Athens is found the frightful custom that two miserable human beings, one of each sex, were yearly nourished at the public cost, and then solemnly sacrificed at the feast of the Thargelia for expiation of the people. Not only did the Consul Decius, at the head of his army, solemnly devote himself for his country, but so often as a great and general calamity threatened the existence of the Roman State human sacrifices were offered, and a male and female Gaul, a male and female Greek, or those of any other nation whence danger threatened, were buried alive in the ox-market, with magic forms of prayer uttered by the head of the college of the Quindecemviri. Nay, the human sacrifices yearly offered upon the Alban Mount to Jupiter Latiaris were continued down to the third century of our era.

What thus took place in Greece and Rome is found likewise amongst almost all the Eastern and Western peoples. The most cruel human sacrifices were nowhere more frequent than among the idolatrous races of Shem, whether Canaanites, Phœnicians, or Carthaginians. These specially offered the eldest or the only son. Egyptian, Persian, Arabian, the most ancient Indian history, and that of the Northern peoples, Scythians, Goths, Russians, Germans, Gauls, British, and the Celts in general, give us examples of the same custom.

The conclusion from all this is, how strong and general in the religious conscience of all ancient peoples was the sense of sinful man’s need to be purified and reconciled with God, and that the means of such reconcilement were thought to be in the vicarious shedding of human blood.

At any rate, we may draw from this custom a corroboration of the meaning which lay in the rite of bloody sacrifice of animals, that the vicarious offering of an animal’s life, which was deemed to be seated in the blood, was made in the stead of a human life as a ransom for it, as is exactly expressed in the lines of Ovid —

 
“Cor pro corde precor, pro fibris accipe fibras,
Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus,”
 

– Ovid, Fasti, 6, 161.

The vicarious character of animal sacrifice is shown in the Egyptian usage, wherein a seal was put upon oxen found pure and spotless for sacrifice, which represented a man kneeling with hands bound behind his back, and a sword put to his throat, while the bystanders lamented the slaughtered animal and struck themselves on the breast. The same idea that the victim was a ransom for man’s life is also found in the Indian sacrificial ritual.⁹⁵

The institution of bloody sacrifice, then, was not merely an instinctive confession by man of guilt before God, though this confession was contained in it in an eminent degree, but sprung from a direct divine appointment. This conclusion is borne in upon the mind by its existence every where, and by the astonishing force with which it seemed to hold all parts of human life in its grasp. Such an influence, again, shows the extent to which, in the original constitution of things, all human life was bound up in a dependence upon God. Not mental acts only, acts of adoration, thanksgiving, petition, and expiation were enjoined, but all these were expressed in a visible, corporeal action, and associated with it. It is precisely in this association that I trace the stamp of the divine appointment, as well as a seal of permanence, which is shown in the unbroken maintenance of the rite through so many shiftings of races and revolutions of governments in the lapse of so many centuries.

Thus on the original human society, the family of the first man, God had impressed the idea that man by sin had forfeited his life before God; that there must be reparation for that forfeiture; that such reparation was one day to be made by the offering of an innocent victim; that in the meantime the vicarious sacrifice of animals should be offered to God as a confession of man’s guilt; that their blood poured out before Him and sprinkled on the sacrifices should be accepted by God in token of an expiation.

Now what we have seen of the original institution of sacrifice will help to show how absolutely divine an act it was which our Lord took upon Himself in establishing a sacrifice for His people. But He was not only ordering a new worship; He was likewise at once fulfilling and abolishing by that fulfilment the old, that which had prevailed from the beginning of man’s race. Instead of the blood of animals poured out profusely all over the world, He said, “This is the chalice, the new testament in My Blood, which shall be shed for you;” and speaking as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, using also the special sacrificial term, He said, “This is My Body, which is given for you; do this for a commemoration of Me.” The act was doubly a divine act, in appointing a sacrifice for the whole human race, and in making His own Body that sacrifice; the first an act of divine authority, the second not that only, but pointing out the personal union of the Godhead with the Manhood, in virtue of which the communication of His flesh gives life to the world, as He had foretold a year before: “The bread which I will give is My flesh for the life of the world.”⁹⁶ Thus the Christian sacrifice is the counterpart of the original institution, and throws the light of fulfilment upon that offering of the blood of bulls and goats which seemed in itself so unreasonable; which would have been so, but that it earned in itself the mystery hidden from the foundation of the world. Thus it was that the animal creation placed below man was chosen to bear witness in its flesh and blood to the offering which was to restore man, and the Lord of life made use of the life which He had given to signify in a speaking prophecy that supreme exhibition of His mercy, His justice, and His majesty, which He had purposed from the beginning. If the earth without Calvary might seem to have been a slaughter-house, Calvary made it an altar.

But if this be the relation of the Christian sacrifice to the original institution in general, it has a special relation to that whole order of hierarchy and sacrifice which was established by Moses. The whole body of the Mosaic law, from head to foot and in its minutest part, was constructed to be fulfilled in Christ. It was alike His altar and His throne, prepared for Him fifteen hundred years before His coming. Moses found the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal sacrifice, and drew out both so as to be a more detailed picture of the Priesthood and Sacrifice which were to be.

Then as the whole ancient worship, whether Patriarchal, or Jewish, or Gentile, had been concentrated in sacrifice, the Lord of all, coming to create the world anew, in the night of His Passion, and as the prelude of it, instituted the new Priesthood, and made it the summary of His whole dispensation. The Priest according to the order of Melchisedec came forth to supply what was wanting in the Levitical priesthood. Signs passed into realities, and the Precious Blood took the place of that blood which had been shed all over the earth from the sacrifice of Abel onwards.⁹⁷ St. Paul has told us how the King of justice and of peace, fatherless, motherless, and without genealogy in the sacred narrative, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, as then recorded, was the image of the Son of God, who remains a Priest for ever. For though He was to offer Himself once upon the altar of the cross, by death, to God His Father, and to work out eternal redemption, His Priesthood was not to be extinguished by His death. Therefore in the Last Supper, on the very night of His betrayal, He would leave to His beloved bride the Church a visible sacrifice, such as the nature of man required. This should represent the bloody sacrifice once enacted on the cross; this should preserve its memory fresh and living to the end of time; this should apply its saving virtue to the remission of sins daily committed by human frailty. Thus He declared Himself a Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec. He presented His Body and His Blood under the species of bread and wine to God His Father. Under these symbols He gave them to His Apostles to receive, and so doing He made them priests of the new testament, and charged them, and those who should succeed them in this priesthood, to make this offering, by the words, “This do in commemoration of Me;” thus, as St. Paul adds, “showing the death of the Lord until He come.”⁹⁸ For when He had celebrated that old Pasch which the multitude of the children of Israel immolated in memory of their coming out of Egypt, He made Himself the new Pasch, that this should be celebrated by the Church through her priests in visible signs, in commemoration of His passage from this world to the Father, when by the shedding forth of His own Blood He redeemed us and delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into His own kingdom. This is the pure oblation, incapable of being stained by the unworthiness or malice of those who offer it, which God by the mouth of His prophet Malachias prophesied, saying, “From the rising of the sun even to the going down thereof My name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to My name a clean oblation.” This St. Paul pointed out with equal clearness when he wrote, “The things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God; and I would not that you should be made partakers with devils. You cannot drink the chalice of the Lord and the chalice of devils: you cannot be partakers of the table of the Lord and of the table of devils.” For as in the one case the table indicates the altar on which the heathen sacrifice was offered, so on the other it indicates the altar on which the sacrifice of Christ is offered; and the reality asserted in the one case is equally asserted in the other. And this, in fine, is that offering, the figure of which was given by those various similitudes of sacrifices in the time of nature and the time of the law; for, as the consummation and perfection of all these, it embraces every blessing which they signified.

All the force which sacrifice originally had to represent doctrine in a visible form, in accordance with the twofold nature of man, belonged in the most eminent degree to the sacrifice thus instituted. It became at once the centre of the Church’s worship, being celebrated by the Apostles daily,⁹⁹ as we are told, while the Liturgies of the East and West make any question as to the character of the sacrifice impossible, and show how the great acts of adoration, thanksgiving, petition, and expiation were united in it and with it. It was the voice of the Christian people evermore mounting to the Eternal Father, and representing to Him in an action of infinite solemnity how He “so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish but may have life everlasting.”¹⁰⁰

But more particularly let us observe the doctrines which our Lord taught, and as it were clothed with flesh in the daily sacrifice of the Church.

First, the cardinal doctrine of religion from the beginning, as it is equally the certain witness of human reason, the unity of the Godhead; for the sacrifice is offered to the one God alone. It is the guardian of this great primary truth from all corruption, whether the polytheistic corruption of division and limitation, or the pantheistic corruption of vagueness and impersonality. Wherever this sacrifice is offered, the great Christian unity of the one living and holy God, the God who knows, the God who wills, the God who creates, is maintained by those who offer it.

Secondly, the Trinity of the Divine Persons; for the sacrifice consists in the offering of God the Son in His human nature as a sin-offering for man to His Father: “Wherein the same Christ is contained, and immolated without blood, who once on the altar of the cross offered Himself with blood;”¹⁰¹ which, moreover, is accomplished by the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the gifts. Thus the three Divine Persons enter into the sacrifice, He to whom it is offered, He who offers it, and He by whose operation it is consummated. So distinct yet so interwoven is their action, so divine in each, that the sacrifice guards the doctrine of the most Blessed Trinity as it guards that of the Divine Unity, and those who offer this sacrifice are faithful in the maintenance of the second mystery as in that of the first. But the Divine Unity and Trinity is the very life of God, the very source of beatitude, to the knowledge and the faith of which this sacrifice subserves. It preaches these truths as no mere word could preach them; for action and word enter into each other and complete themselves reciprocally in the sacrifice.

Thirdly, the stupendous mystery of God the Creator assuming a created nature for the sake of the creature enters into the very substance of the sacrifice. This can scarcely be expressed more distinctly than by the very words of St. Justin Martyr in the second century, who says, “We receive not these as common bread or common drink, but as by the word of God Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so we have been taught also that the food which has been blessed by the word of prayer made by Him, from which our blood and our flesh are by their change nourished, are the flesh and the blood of that incarnate Jesus. For the Apostles, in their memorials called the Gospels, have handed down that thus Jesus enjoined them: that He took bread, and having blessed it, said, This do in commemoration of Me: this is My Body; and that He took likewise the chalice, and having blessed it, said, This is my Blood.”¹⁰² Here the martyr appeals to the reality of the flesh assumed by the Word, as a supposition necessary to understand the reality of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist, as St. Ignatius had done before him, and as St. Irenæus and others did after him.¹⁰³ In this connection, Eusebius of Cæsarea, setting forth the typical character of the Jewish Pasch and its fulfilment in the new covenant, says, “The followers of Moses sacrificed the Paschal Lamb only once a year, on the fourteenth day of the first month about evening tide, but we in the new covenant celebrating the Pasch every Sunday, are ever satisfied with the Body of the Lord, and ever take part in the Blood of the Lamb.”¹⁰⁴ And here, once more, wherever this sacrifice is truly offered, the offerers show themselves truly penetrated by that belief which comes next in preciousness and dignity to the belief in the Divine Unity and Trinity – the belief of that assumption by the Divine Son of human nature, on which the Christian faith rests.

Fourthly, the sacrifice in St. Paul’s words, “Sets forth the Lord’s death till He come,” that is, the divine act of redemption; for in it our Lord lies upon the altar in the state of a victim, the flesh and the blood separated, as in the state of death, which He took upon Himself voluntarily for the sin of the world, being offered because He willed it Himself. The sacrifice exhibits most directly this act of the divine love, which with that other act just treated of, the assumption of human nature, makes up the double mystery of God’s love to man – the double mystery which, boundless and immeasurable as are the power and the wisdom disclosed to man’s reason in the structure of the visible universe, disclosed equally in the infinity of smallness as in the infinity of greatness, disclosed in every branch of science and every portion of nature, makes both power and wisdom to pale before the greatness of condescendence and affection; for truly it is greater that the Maker of all these things should, for the sake of one of them, descend from His greatness, and that the Lord of life and Author of beauty should encounter death and embrace dishonour, than that He should have created the universe in all its magnificence by the word of His power. But here, in this sacrifice, He lies before His people in the state of annihilation, dishonour, and death. The world’s ransom is ever in the sight of those whom He has ransomed, in the very act of paying their debt: the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world goes through its unfolding centuries, ever presenting to His Father the price which He has paid for the salvation of His brethren. And it may be noted that those who offer the Divine Sacrifice in the complete faith of the Church preserve at the same time their full assurance in that redemption which separated sects seem to lose as a consequence of their division, it being too great and awful a doctrine for their weak and paralysed condition to bear.

For it is impossible, fifthly, to separate the gift of adoption from the Divine Sacrifice, which contains it and imparts it. Wherefore does the Son of the Eternal Father lie upon the altar in the state of death? He cries out aloud there, “Behold I and my children whom God has given Me.” It is precisely out of the act assuming our nature, and out of the act offering that nature to death, that He draws His human family. It is after the detailed account of His sufferings in the 21st Psalm that He concludes with the words which St. Paul has quoted in this connection:¹⁰⁵ “I will declare Thy name to My brethren: in the midst of the Church will I praise Thee.” It is in the act of priesthood that He creates His race. “Because the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner has been partaker of them, that through death He might destroy him who had the empire of death.” Thus, “It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might become a merciful and faithful High Priest before God.” And the daily act of His Priesthood thus performed, the unbloody immolation for ever presented before God in the eyes of His people, is the bond and pledge to them of the communicated sonship. They who have the Church’s daily sacrifice have never fallen from the belief of the divine brotherhood, have never substituted for it the natural kinship of fallen man. They have not sunk away from the bond of redemption giving sonship, to the phantom of brotherhood, dispensing with faith, and vainly calling on men to unite in the midst of national enmity, broken belief, and thirst for material enjoyment. The Divine Sacrifice, as it is the instrument, so also it is the guardian of divine adoption, and perpetuates it upon the earth.

There are three parts, so to say, of adoption which are further distinctly contained in the Divine Sacrifice. The first of these is the derivation of spiritual life from the Person of Christ; for here especially is fulfilled what He said of Himself, “The Bread of God is that which cometh down from heaven and giveth life to the world.” In the act of sacrifice He becomes also the food of His brethren: here He was from the beginning daily; here He is to the end. This is the inmost junction of life with belief, so that the faithful people by its presence attesting belief in the Divine Unity and Trinity, in the Incarnation of the Son of God, in His redemption of the race, in the adoption of man by God, at the same time become partakers of the life which these doctrines declare. The perfection of the divine institution consists in this absolute blending of belief, worship, and practice. The unbelieving Jews strove among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?” Our Lord answered by establishing a rite on which His Church lives through all the ages, in which He bestows Himself on each believer individually, being as much his as if He was for him alone. Space and time disappear before the Author of life in the act of communicating Himself, and He is the sole Teacher of His Church, in that He alone feeds it with the Divine Food, which is Himself.

But this food is the source of sanctification: as that by which man fell away from God was sin, so that which unites him to God is holiness. It is from the Incarnate Son in the act of sacrifice that this holiness emanates to His people; and the gift of His flesh, the banquet at the sacrifice, dispenses it. No teaching of words could so identify the Person of our Lord with the source of holiness as the bodily act of receiving His flesh. It is the command, “Be ye holy, for I am holy,” expressed in action. This is the perennial fountain of holiness which wells forth in the midst of His Church; and beside it, as subordinate and preparatory, is the perpetual tribunal of penance: one and the other given to meet and efface the perpetual frailties of daily life, first to restore the fallen, and then to join them afresh with the source of holiness.

There is yet another gift consequent upon adoption, which completes as it were the two we have just mentioned. It is that the flesh of our Lord given in the Blessed Sacrament is the pledge and earnest of eternal life. This He has Himself said in the words, “He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood hath everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” And St. Thomas, in the beautiful conclusion to the grandest of hymns, has summed up numberless comments of the Fathers on these divine words, where he sings —

 
“Bone Pastor, panis vere,
Jesu nostri miserere,
Tu nos pasce, nos tuere;
Tu nos bona fac videre
In terra viventium:
Tu qui cuncta scis et vales,
Qui nos pascis hic mortales,
Tuos ibi commensales
Cohæredes et sodales
Fac sanctorum civium.”
 

The Fathers¹⁰⁶ with great zeal insist that the physical Body of Christ in the Eucharist, being one in all the receivers, is a principle of unity of Christ’s mystical Body. St. Augustine especially dwells upon this effect in Christ’s mystical Body, but the effect presupposes the cause, which is that physical Body of Christ received by each.

Take an instance of the first statement, that is, the presence of Christ’s physical Body, in St. Chrysostom. Commenting on the words, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?” he says, “Let us learn what is the marvel of the mysteries, what they are, why they were given, and what is their use. We become, He says, one body, members of His flesh and of His blood. Let those who are initiated follow my words. That we may be so, then, not only by charity but in actual fact, let us be fused with that Flesh. For it is done by that Food which He bestowed on us in the desire to show us the longing which He had for us. He mingled Himself with us, and made His Body one mass with us, that we may be one thing, as a body united with its head. This is what Christ did for us, to draw us to closer friendship and to show His own longing for us; He granted those who desired Him, not only to see Him but to touch Him, and to eat Him, and to fix their teeth in His Flesh, to be joined in His embrace, and to satisfy all their longing. Parents often give their children to be nourished by others; I not so, but I nourish you with My own Flesh; I set Myself before you. I wished to become your Brother, I have partaken of flesh and blood for you; again, I give to you that Flesh and Blood whereby I became your kinsman.”¹⁰⁷

Of the effect proceeding from this cause St. Augustine says, “The whole redeemed city, the assembly and society of the saints, is offered as an universal sacrifice to God by the Great Priest, who also offered Himself in His Passion for us, according to the form of a servant, that we might be the Body of so great a Head. For this form He offered, in this He was offered, because according to this He is Mediator, in this Priest, in this Sacrifice. When, therefore, the Apostle exhorted us to present our bodies a living sacrifice: ‘For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another:’ this is the sacrifice of Christians, many one body in Christ. Which also the Church constantly performs in the sacrifice of the altar, as the faithful know, where it is shown to her that she is offered herself in that which she offers.” As he says a little further on, “Of which thing (that is, Christ being, in the form of a servant, both Priest and Victim) He willed the daily sacrifice of the Church to be the Sacrament; for she being the Body, as He the Head, she learns to offer herself by Him. To this supreme and true sacrifice all false sacrifices have given way.”¹⁰⁸

Thus, then, the question has been answered how our Lord impressed for ever on the world the double act of His Priesthood, the assumption of human nature to His Divine Person, and the offering of that assumed nature in sacrifice. For whereas He made the bloody sacrifice once for all upon the altar of the cross, He ordered the daily sacrifice of His Church to represent it for ever in the name of His people to God the Father, wherein He immolates Himself without blood. “What then?” says St. Chrysostom; “do we not offer every day? We do offer, but making a commemoration of His death. And this is one sacrifice, and not many. How is it one and not many? Because that was once offered which entered into the Holy of holies. This is the figure of that. For we offer ever the same; not to-day one lamb and another to-morrow, but always the same. So that the sacrifice is one. Otherwise, according to the objection, ‘Since it is offered many times,’ are there many Christs? By no means, but there is one Christ everywhere, complete here and complete there, one Body. As then He, being offered in many places, is one Body and not many bodies, so there is one sacrifice. Our High-Priest is He who offered the sacrifice that cleanses us; that same we offer now which was then offered, which is inconsumable. This is done for a commemoration of that which was then done; for, ‘Do this,’ He says, ‘in commemoration of Me.’ We offer not another sacrifice as the (Jewish) high-priest, but ever the same; or rather we make a commemoration of the sacrifice.”¹⁰⁹