CORRESPONDENCE.
INTERCOMMUNION.
(To THE EDITOR or THE " &POTATO/L.1
Sse,—The reunion of Christendom, or in our present hope reunion of the Anglican with other Reformed Churches, is a consummation barred mainly by a refusal on the port of Anglicans to have Intercommunion with Presbyterians and Free Churchmen. They require episcopal ordination for the minister of the Sacrament, episcopal confirmation for the communicant. This requirement is deduced from the ordinance of Christ, from Whom Apostles received authority to " bind " and "loose," and therefore to order the method of the Sacrament. This authority has been transmitted down a line of Bishops who hare ordained priests to celebrate the Eucharist; only such priests hold the office by Christ's command; and only they can consecrate a " valid " • Communion.
The historic proof of the Anglican contention is strongly resisted, and is very resistible because the lineaments of the history ore at the critical period so dim. Would it not in any case be wise to begin the argument from the other end—to ask not what is the episcopacy which has given us our Eucharistic rite, but what is the Eucharist itself! If we can know what is the fart of the Holy Communion, what is the law of its being, this will teach us what the order is of its right celebration, as, who ought to minister it and who partake. Some Anglican theologians do adopt this procedure, and find that the celebrant is created by a necessity of the rite, and an ordaining Bishop by a necessity of the celebrant; they deduce the Bishop from the Eucherist, not the Eucharist from the Bishop. Surely they are right as to method.
What is the fact, then, of the Eucharist? It is a pert, we dare to my the moat vital part, of the world-fact. For the most we know of the world-secret is the thing we call Life. And Life, as far as unveiled to us by Nature and human existence, is the interchange of substance or force between creature and environ- ment, which at the level of mankind becomes an interchange of a human mind with other minds and with the All-Mind. For sake of a name let us call it "Interconsciousness."
But man is the "social animal." Hie life is not merely a mutual vibration between two terms, an organism and an environment—it is worked between three terms: the man, a society, and the Whole of Being. Man's temporal existence is constituted by his relations to his family, and of both to the nation; his civic existence is a mutuality of citizen and State and (for other than German thinkers) of the power above the State, Humanity or Divinity. Analogously his spiritual life is an intercourse of the single soul with a Church, and of both with the Maker of the Church. Of this life the greatest instrument is the Sacrament of the Supper. By it Church and member vivify each the other by a communing which is a commune of both with Christ. This is what happens in a true communion; life is worked in member and Church through a life they have in it onto Christ. By this it is known that the Sacrament has been duly celebrated. We are not first or last to ask, Has the minister been ordained by a Bishop or by a Presbytery or by a congrega- tion P But, Has the rite made life in the participants, the Church and the member P Has there been the spiritual Inter- consciousness of Christ and each of these two ? Has there happened that communion of the three in mind and will, which is a Real Presence of the Christ to worshipper and to Church P These are not the questions commonly asked by ecclesiastic disputants; but the answer to them holds the decision of the dispute.
The Catholic will say that the criterion is impracticable. because spiritual life "cornetts not with observation." We cannot register the action that passes in the soul of minietrant and participant; we can know when and where and by whom the celebrant was commissioned, and therefore whether he was deputed by a deputy of Apostles who were the deputed of Christ. Your test, they say, of spiritual enlivenment of mule is a measuring-rod for angels, not for men. Rather it is the measuring- rod which all men use in their religious judgments where the judgment is really their own. The whole history of the Church is an experiment of its members in the way and means of having life unto God through Christ, and therefore in the way of attain- ing life by the Sacrament of the Body and Blood. Do we think Christians have used this instrument of life all them centuries because the " primitive " Christian society adopted and trans- mitted it, or have dispensed with it because that authorization was not proven P. They have continued its use, as men continue to take a food or an exercise, because it was life in vein and limb; or they have modified the usage because they found, or seemed to find, the new mode more vitalizing than the old. If " the masses will be won by the Mass," as some prophesy, it will be through a congruity of that ritual with the popular instinct for religion; if the Friends dispense with the rite and await a view- less advent of the Spirit, it is because they find the Spirit does come at their silent, actionless invocation. Creed and practice alike we test by the experience that in them we have life. By this test the Christian Church has made, and will maintain or remake, her rules of the Holy Communion.
Her experiment has of late entered an mute stage. The Communion of Kikuyu four years ago applied the touchstone to the principle of exclusiveness. Where divided communities of Christians (it was asked) are at work on heathenism in the face of aggressive Mohammedism, does it make for life that Confirma- tion should be the indispensable condition of Communion? To-day the chaplains at the front, standing in line with their brother- shepherds of divided flocks, must be asking themselves even more searchingly the ancient question: "To whom may the Grail be served, and from what source is it served F" For, as a Fleming
rote in the first days of this bloodshedding, "A good school is the face of Death," the best of schools to teach the significance of Life, and the way of the Sacrament which is the ministry of life.
The experiment, then, is making. It is not this writer's aim to forecast the result on Sacramental theory and practice; he does not forecast it for himself, but is only pleading that the inquiry should be made. But this he ventures: that this reflection on the nature of the Sacrament brings us not only the method of inquiry, but also the inspiration of it. If the Eucharist works its grace on Church and member through a triune Interconseious- nese of these and Christ, then the Interconsciousnese which enables us to do the act of Communion will also enable us to know what that action is. To think truly of the Sacrament and its order we must think it by means of the thought working in no from the Founder. We must let that mind be in ue which was also in Christ Jesus founding in it—nay, the mind which is 111 Him, the thought which the Living Master of the Feast is at this hoar thinking and can fiend by the pulsation of a thought- transference into the mind of a disciple pondering in reverent desire the mystery of the living bread. We have said above that the Eucharistic fact must be its awn interpreter and direct the order of its celebration. But the Eucharistic fact is the converse of Christ's thought with man's. Then He who promised that a Real Presence of Him would "show us the coming thing:" will in this new day be a sure interpreter of how the Feast shall be ordered, who shall bless the bread, who shall be worthy to break and take, and become one body, one bread of life.
In the fable of mediaeval Churchmen great miseries of Christendom remained uncured because a seeker in the Grail castle failed through a faulty reverence to put the question " Whereto is the Grail served, and whereof ? " That is fable. But the need for the questioning is fact. Churches and Churchmen are at fault if they are too timid to ask for the truth.—I am,
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