MR. HATCH ON EARLY CHURCH ORGANISATION.* AFTER the admirable and
scholarly excursus of the present Bishop of Durham on the Christian Ministry appended to his .commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians, he would be either a supremely bold or supremely ignorant controversialist who would venture to affirm that there was either Scriptural or early ecclesiastical authority for the existing distinction of clerical functionaries, such as obtains in our own communion, as consisting of the three orders of bishops, priests, and deacons. The Bampton lecturer for 1880, be it said at once, is too well versed in Apostolic and Patristic literature, in its widest sense, to be found in the ranks of those disputants who would contest any one of the positions which have been marked out so clearly, and maintained with so much strategic, yet morally unpolemic science, by Bishop Lightfoot. We should, however, be doing great injustice to the present lecturer, if we were even to sug- gest to our readers the impression that in the fulfilment of his trust he was merely acquiescent in the conclusions of thought- ful and learned inquirers, who had surveyed before him the ground over which he has elected to travel. And we have, on the contrary, no hesitation in saying that of all the Bampton Lectures which have been delivered in recent years, and of most, if not of all, of which a review has been supplied in these columns, we cannot recall, while we write, a single course of 'them which combines so much scholarship, so much detach- ment from foregone conclusions, so much patient manipulation of "evidence," so much of historical second-sight—and second- sight is, in all departments of art and literature, and politics, too, the differentia of genius—with a masterful possession of lucid and manly English, which rises at times, as if spon- taneously, into eloquence of a very high order. In these words we may seem to be indulging in extravagant euloginm, but no words of ours of a more qualified character would at all -adequately represent the great value which the present volume ]las in our esteem, or as it seems to us, the great originality with which Mr. Hatch has treated his subject.
The lecturer lives in the nineteenth century, and the his- torical science of the century has been made by him his own. But he has made it his own not in a vague way of loose genera. lisation, but by a laborious and protracted endeavour to apply to a very special group of phenomena the methods which have been fruitful of such rich results in other fields of history ; his preliminary, and, by us, entirely approved assumption being this,—that as matters of historical research, the facts of eccle- siastical history do not differ in kind from the facts of civil history. Mr. Hatch believes in " the reign of law," and if we interpret his method and conclusions aright, he finds law reign- ing, not only in the physiological, but in what may be called the pathological aspects, in the development of the organisation -of the Christian Church. The very " little flock "—little, in- deed !—before whose eyes and hearts was held out no less a future than that of being the conquerors of the world—the sheep to whom the promise was announced that, seemingly helpless and unprotected as they were, they should yet win "the kingdom," and subdue the " wolves "—had somehow to provide for their own existence and continuance, and custom, the custom to which they had been habituated in their pre- Christian condition, would naturally prevail with them in the order they adopted, and the kind of guidance which they felt to be necessary. They felt that they must keep together, in a solidarity of brotherly attachment, loyal to each other, and, above all, to their ascended Master. They had to assure each other of their steadfast trust in a perfect love, in a great Reconciler who was the ground of their own hearts' rest, and the promiser of the world's peace ; they were bound to be abiding imitators of the " Good Samaritan," whose story, as told by their Lord, laid upon them the mission and the burthen of ever striving to alleviate the sufferings and the sorrows of men ; and they had to make provision that the rising generation should be faithfully instructed in the great truths the reception of which had made themselves free of the world's idolatries,—its idolatry of physical force, of money, and of traditional theological prescription. At the same time, there were "many things " which the Master him- self had explicitly declared that his followers were not yet able to bear when he was taking his farewell from their society. They had, however, as their grand legacy, his "mind ;" and that was
• The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches. Eight Lectures, delivered University of Oxford in the year 1880. Fs Rdwin Hatch, M.A ,ondon : am.rbirteno. 1881
trust in absolute love, and, in direct obedience to that Sovereign Will of inexorable righteousness towards all the helpless beings whom it had called, unwilled by them, into existence, a devo- tion to the welfare of others so supreme and absorbing, as that the life which fulfilled its requirements should look upon minis- tering to the wants of humanity as its very meat and drink. The disciples of Christ were in this divine way to eat his flesh and drink his blood,—were thus to love the world which hated them ; and they had to teach that world also the truths which, if only accepted, would shed a saving health throughout it.
The two essential ministers of Heaven are the Prophet and the Deacon,—the prophet who speaks the word which humanity is waiting to hear, or sorely stands in need of; and the deacon, or minister, who does the work. Between these two the great mission of the Church, as, indeed, the development of society at large, is shared and furthered ; and if in the Church of England we speak of " Priests and Deacons," and if by the law of our country it is forbidden that certain offices in the National Church should be performed except by one who holds what are called "Priest's Orders," still "Priest" —or in its older form, " Prester "—is only the abbreviation of " Presbyter," or " Elder ;" and in the Absolution Ser- vice itself, which only the Presbyter may read aloud in the Congregation, no Pagan notions are implied in the usage, and no magical virtues are claimed for the reader. He " declares and pronounces " simply as God's " minister," so that, taken literally, this very portion of our " Service " is only then ren- dered with the due appreciation of its significance by the officiating functionary, when he understands that he is acting as a deacon, or is, in other words, ministering to the congrega- tion the Gospel of eternal life, which is contained in the assur- ance that the Almighty God, who is infinitely great, is, at the same time, infinitely gracious.
But if we were to ask Mr. Hatch whether this interpretation of the " Absolution " is a justifiable rendering of the mind of the constructors of our Book of Common Prayer, he would say, "That is not the question which I am here considering." He would further reply, " My questions are these,—what offices did the Bishop, the Deacon, and the Presbyter discharge in the infancy of the Church, and what were the urgent needs which necessitated a Church organisation P" And in answer to these questions, he has given us, first, a presentation of the militant estate of the young Christian community, girdled around by a vast multitude of hostile contemporaries, which, in vividness and pathetic interest, is altogether poetic in quality, and more impressive than we have found in the pages of any previous Church historian. And secondly, he has demonstrated, with a faultless logic, and singularly delicate historical tact, how those officers, whose functions were originally purely and almost exclu- sively eleemosynary, the Overseer (or Bishop) and the Deacon, and the disciplinary Elders—" ruling Elders "—the last imported into the Christian society alike from Jewish and Gentle precedent were transformed into the three Clerical Orders of Bishop, Priest, and Deacon. Of the humour which is contained in the trans- formation, Mr. Hatch says nothing, but there it is all the same ; and it tries one's gravity not a little, as one reflects how the Presbyter, who now-a-days attires himself so gorgeously in celebrating the Lord's Supper, originally took no part in its celebration at all. In the account, for instance, of the adminis- tration of the Eucharist which is given us by Justin Martyr, the Presbyter finds no place. Again, it is clear, says Mr. Hatch, that the Presbyters of the Early Church did not necessarily teach, and, as a matter of Church order, a Presbyter could only baptise in emergencies ! Our lecturer keeps on a plane far above the din and smoke of common-place controversy; but in the pages before us he has none the less dealt the most damaging blow to the pretensions of ministerial succession : the priest, who claims the intrinsic power of binding and loosing, is the successor of an officer who had no authority whatever in the Early Church either to teach or administer the Sacraments. The successive stages of the abnormal, yet, as time went on, the inevitably necessary, transmutation of the official character of the leading directors of the affairs of the Church, are traced with a very vigorous hand by Mr. Hatch ; and the reader will further learn from him how, as the community grew in numbers, the necessity of maintaining a strict discipline among the multitude, and later, the perils to thought and morals which lay in the Gnosticism that was everywhere "in the air," and which dissolved both the world of fact and the world of pheno- mena into mere shadowy symbols of a lawless intellect- ualism, called loudly for the concentration of authority. The Bishop became the centre and the seat both of light and controlling power. In the course of his exhibition of the way in which, at last, the Clergy became a separate class, in a society in which, at its first starting, there were what we would now call lay teaching, lay baptism, and lay celebration of the Holy Communion, Mr. Hatch puts in a noble vindication of the efforts and aims of Tertullian, in his protest against the in- creasing domination of the clerical body ; and of this protest he says, "It was a beating of the wings of pietism against the iron bars of organisation. It was the first, though not the last, rebellion of the religious sentiment against official religion."
These words are found in Mr. Hatch's fifth lecture, which is brought to a close by the following eloquent sentence :-
" In earlier times, there was a grander faith. For the kingdom of God was a kingdom of priests. Not only the Four•and-twenty Elders before the Throne,' but the innumerable souls of the sanctified, upon whom the Second death had no power,' were kings and priests unto God. Only in that high sense was priesthood predicable of Christian men. For the Shadow had passed ; the Reality had come ; the one High Priest of Christianity was Christ."
If, as has been finely said, the true historian is the prophet with his eyes directed to the past, Mr. Hatch may fairly be ranked in the goodly fellowship of the best reproducers of a state of things which has passed away. But Mr. Hatch is not afraid to look on, as well as to look back ; and the peroration of the whole Lectures, in which he gives glowing expression to the steadfast hope that the Christianity which survived Polythe- ism and the disruption of the Roman Empire and Gnosticism, will survive Agnosticism too, is a noble one. He notes the new surroundings of the Church in this nineteenth century, and if the secret of the past be the key to the future, the institutions of Christianity are destined, in the providence of God, to shape themselves into new forms, to meet the new needs of men. The forms of these will be left, as they have been left, in human hands ; but the problems behind the forms are these,—there is a widening separation of class from class ; there is a growing social strain ; there is a disturbance of the political eqnlibrium ; there is the rise of an educated proletariat ; and, according to our lecturer, the unaccomplished mission of Christianity is to reconstruct society on the basis of brotherhood.
But our limits are exhausted, and we will take lea•:e of this noble, suggestive, manly, and scholarly and truly Christian volume, by quoting the author's concluding words :—
" To you and me, and men like ourselves, is committed, in these anxious days, that which is at once an awful responsibility and a splendid destiry,—to transform this modern world into a Christian society, to change the socialism which is based on the assumption of clashing interests into the socialism which is based on the sense of spiritual union ; and to gather together the scattered forces of a divided Christendom into a confederation in which organisation will be of less account than fellowship with one Spirit and faith in one Lord,—into a communion wide as human life, and deep as human need ; into a Church which shall outshine even the golden glory of its dawn, by the splendour of its eternal noon."
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