USA > New York > Oneida County > Utica > One hundred years of Trinity Church : Utica, New York > Part 5
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ing this morning on the important subject which also they have assigned.
And for this our thoughts must immediately recur to the period of the church's life since the steps of the pioneer mis- sionary in 1798 brought about the organization of this parish. A hundred years ago! How feeble and faltering was our Church in those days. How strong and aggressive is she to- day. Then, though she had seven bishops and two hundred other clergy, the Church was invested with almost invincible suspicion from them that were without, and seriously handi- capped by many uncertainties of internal co-ordination. Now, with her 84 bishops, and nearly 50,000 priests and deacons in 58 dioceses, and 28 missionary jurisdictions, with 700,000 communicants increasing 50,000 yearly, with volun- tary contributions, reported last year, of over twelve and a half millions of dollars, with nineteen theological schools, 4 training schools for deaconesses, 8 colleges, 143 schools for boys and girls, 90 hospitals and dispensaries, 129 home or- phanages and shelters, 32 religious orders, and 20 Church clubs-the Church to-day is as a giant refreshed with new wine, confident, alert, winning the confidence of the American people, enforcing a genuine regard on account of her fidelity to the historical faith, and of her large and liberal sympathy for the needs of men, becoming more and more a principal factor in the solution of present-age problems, religious, so- cial and individual.
In so far as the American Church may be viewed from the standpoint of human organization and polity, I know nothing which more truly and aptly discovers the secret of her adapt- `ability to the needs of our people from age to age, than the original plan of wise Bishop William White as thus outlined by his worthy successor, Bishop Alonzo Potter.
"The peace of 1783 had not been concluded before he
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(Bishop White), had sketched out a pamphlet entitled "The Case of the Episcopal Considered." A plan for the re-organ- ization of our infant communion, which shows the compre- hensive skill of a statesman, and which ultimately commend- ed itself to general acceptance. The essential unity of the whole American Church as a national church, its independ- ence of any foreign jurisdiction, the entire separation of the spiritual and temporal authority, the participation of the laity in the legislation and government of the church, and in the election of its ministers of every grade, the equality of all parishes, and a three fold organization (diocesan, provincial and general) were fundamental principles in his plan, as they were in that which was finally adopted." Here was a broad and sure foundation, and combined as it was with the firm conviction of our first master builders, "That this church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline or worship; or far- ther than local circumstances require," it was a foundation capable of uprearing the great historical and variedly ap- pointed fabric which not a few of our judicious prophets and seers already like to denominate-the American church for the American people. It is no unsubstantial vision. For in- deed a church must have true connection with all the past of Christianity, a national church must be prepared to co-or- dinate with the constitutional structure of the nation in which God has placed her; and an American church must be in- stinct with the genius, and open minded to the boundless re- sources and activities of the American people. Small as our communion is besides some other Christian bodies, yet, with- out the least disposition to stretch ourselves above nature, but taking a just consideration of the facts of history and the conditions of the present, we may well hope that if the church shall hold the original foundation sure and continually re-
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consecrate her spirits and efforts, the vision of our prophets in due time will be realized.
But though man proposes, God disposes. If our church were but a human fabric, we could have no such confidence. If we could not steadfastly look beyond the judicious White and his co-laborers of the sub-revolutionary age to the far distant past of original Christianity, our present vision would be that of deluded followers of a forlorn hope. We may never forget the momentous promise of the divine head of the church: "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world," nor the conviction and teachings of his first disciples, "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ; ye are built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner- stone; in whom all the building, fitly framed together, grow- eth unto an holy temple in the Lord." We have no option; we must keep the original compact of God in Christ, which no age has ever been, nor can ever be, competent to disannul. The Church is not of this age nor of that; but it is the Church of the ages, and were our own Church but the creation of a hundred years or of 350 years, we should have no justifica- tion for the present, nor any security for the future. I will not consume your time in the needless attempt to vindicate our Church's historical position as apostolic. That repeated- ly has been proved invulnerable whether to ponderous bulls of Popes or to slender shafts of sectarianism. Her creeds and her Bible, her ministry and her sacraments have constituted both an impenetrable armor, and ever available munition against attacks from every side. The appeal to history is our especial delight, while our champions, equipped and resolute, standing from age to age on the Church's ramparts-a Hooker, a Laud, and an Andrewes, a Bull and a Waterland, a White, a Seabury and a Hobart, a Gladstone, a Pusey and a
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Church, a Lightfoot and a Liddon, a Westcott and a Temple, a DeKoven, a Potter, a Doane, a Coxe and a Huntington, have made it abundantly needless for me to proffer a puny weapon on behalf of our Church's genuine apostolicity.
My particular duty, directed by the subject assigned, is to claim the Church's adaptability to the needs of our own age --- a claim which almost a cursory survey of what the Church is and is doing will vindicate without special word of mine. Nevertheless I must try in some measure to fulfill my ap- pointed task. And first, in accord with the analogy of our Church's consistent position with reference to her true histor- ical character, I must ask your thought to recur to the original authority of our blessed Lord. Before departing from his first commissioned apostles, he gathered them to his side and said: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now; howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth is come he will guide you into all the truth; he shall glorify me, for he shall receive of mine and shall show it unto you." This is the original divine charter of the Church's adaptability from age to age, having equal authority and necessity with that other or- iginal divine charter of the Church's continuing apostolicility; "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." The first disciples were unequipped to meet any tasks of their own age, without the presence and power of the Holy Spirit; now were they competent to discharge those tasks without the co-operating ability of their own experience. They were, in- deed, absolutely reliable witnesses to the resurrection of the Son of God, for which they had but to declare-"We saw the Lord dead and we saw him risen again"-and thus in Jerusa- lem for a few years they tarried, adding many to the Church, who "continued steadfastly in the teaching of the Apostles and in the fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the pray- ers." But later, when their numbers largely increased, and after the missions to the Gentiles were inaugurated, the adapt-
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ability to the Apostolic Church came more obviously into effect. Practical problems had to be solved; the problem of the equitable distribution of the common fund among the Hebrews and the Grecians, the problem of opening the door to the Gentiles, the problem of the circumcision of Gentiles, the problem of the Sabbath day, the problem of the lingering immoral and superstitious habits of heathen converts, the problem of the almost universal expectation of the speedy coming of the Lord. The fact of their direct divine commis- sion did not spare the Apostolic leaders the necessity of learn- ing by experience what things the Spirit would have them do. They always sought the guidance of the Spirit, yet also they failed not to take counsel one with another upon special problems of Church extension, or of internal difficulties. Thus they instituted the order of deacons for a practical exigency, it met a need and they continued it; for a time they sustained a sort of communism in material things which, under more complex conditions, was afterward abandoned; they debated long and earnestly upon terms on which the Gentiles should retain communion with the Church, coming at length to a compromise that gave general satisfaction; even so truly apostolic a leader as St. Paul looked for the Lord's early re- turn in visible form, an expectation which generally prevailed among the disciples till the destruction of Jerusalem, A. D. 70, and from that time gradually was dissolved. The church ad- ministered by inspired Apostles, was an adaptable church, and therefore a progressive church. Although the witness of the apostles to the divine facts and verities of the faith was vir- tually fixed and infallible, yet by the adjustment of those facts to new experience the Apostolic Church was, as the church in every age has been and must be conditioned by the original charter of the Master: "When the Spirit of truth is come He shall guide you into all the truth;" and from this our only legitimate inference is, that the Spirit of truth works gradual-
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ly, not simply from God down to men, but also from men up to God through manifold processes of human thought and action.
If now we take a comprehensive survey of the Church's movements from the apostolic age to the present, we observe two broadly marked tendencies operating within the sphere of the human, the mutual contact and counter-agency of which is still striving to affect an even balance of adaptability. The one is medievilism, the other is liberalism. Up to the Refor- mation the preponderating human tendency expressed itself in fixedness or unadaptability; and the Reformation was a divine protest of the Spirit of truth against the unadaptability of medievalism. Since the Reformation and continuing to our day the other tendency has expressed itself in the gradual re- laxation from a co-ordinating, historically authoritative guid- ance, an adaptability breaking out in many places into a licen- tious liberalism. The imperative function of the Spirit of truth in these days is, while still protesting against the unadaptabil- ity of medievalism, to bind up the scattering elements of faith and practice, that mark the wayward course of liberalism, and bring them into a truly divine-human correspondence. If Christendom, before the Reformation, tended to sacrifice free- dom of adaptability for the sake of the theoretic perfection of the organism: its tendency since the Reformation, and still evident in many sections of Protestantism, has been to impair the soundness of the organism by an excessive license of un- regulated adaptability. In either case, where human judgment has proudly presumed against the Spirit of truth, there have been grave spiritual dangers and distress, on the one hand, a torpid conservatism, which is a slow strangulation of all vital reality and human helpfulness, and on the other hand, a spe- cious, infatuous liberalism which is a rampant run to ruin.
Without the smallest desire to vaunt our own historic Church, I am confidently within bounds with the claim that
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in her fundamental constitution, prevailing aim and orderly movement, she is, for this land and age the conspicuous em- bodiment and exponent of the ancient apostolic principle and spirit. She has had her temporary periods of dead conser- vatism; and in certain seasons and places, she has exhibited outbreaks of over weaning liberalism. But in the main she has nobly guarded her Via Media, and been true to what I take to be her true watch cry: Conservativeness with Progress, or if you please, historically and spiritually-consistent adapt- ability; while her motto, which all her sincere lovers might wish were more deeply appreciated and more truly exalted amongst ourselves-a motto which in patient hope she has presented to the generous recognition of them that are with- out-is "In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas."
Again, I will not consume your time in needless proof of this position of the Anglo-American Communion. Our Holy Scriptures translated from the original Greek and Hebrew, yet freely put into the hands of our people, our ancient creeds fencing off the faith and guiding the popular Bible reading against the wastes of ignorance, our confident appeal to an- cient authors, our ever-ready recourse to history, our noble vernacular liturgy which is no hasty manufacture but an or- ganism of timely growth, together with our present day in- creasing outreaches of practical activities will of themselves abundantly justify our honorable claim on behalf of the Church's safe-guarded freedom of adaptability to human needs.
"Strengthen thy stakes and lengthen thy cords" was the in- spired call of the prophet of God's people, as he foresaw the incoming of the Gentiles to the fold of Israel. This call the leaders of the Apostolic Church heeded when, though widely adopting the Church for both Gentile and Jew, they yet pro- claimed "Though we or an angel from heaven preach any
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other gospel than that we preached unto you, let him be an- athema." This call our own Church must likewise heed, and I dare maintain that in all Christendom no Church body is more sincerely and hopefully endeavoring to heed it. The Church of to-day must indeed provide for the hospitable shel- tering of the manifold vital interests of humanity. This is her mission as the authorized visible embodiment of the universal Christ. Her stakes are the verities of the Faith, and to bear up the expanding structure, these must be driven beyond pos- sibility of removal into the very bed-rock of the divine-human personality of the Christ, the Son of the living God. The cords are her varied lines of outreach to all real and necessary human interests, and they may always be safely lengthened if the stakes are correspondingly strengthened. To lengthen the cords without strengthening the stakes is to invite collapse. Yet simply to strengthen the stakes and tighten the cords is to provide a stiff and narrow structure for a small fraction of the whole body of humanity: it is ingeniously to contrive a gilded shrine for a pampered sect rather than faithfully and generously to build up the glorious body of the Saviour of mankind. Our own Church to-day, I say it with no poor boasting, is well rooted in the original faith, while every year she may be seen lengthening her cords of spreading sympathy to embrace the spiritual with the intellectual and social needs of the age. With her feet firm on the past, her mind and her hands intensely occupied with the present, and her eyes, be- hind and before, comprehending the progress of her Lord's Kingdom from the old to the new Jerusalem, the Church is not only holding her own, but steadily winning fresh and im- portant advances. "Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing," and as men who would have understanding of the times, let us strive together with the grace of God to know more and more clear- ly what the Israel of our day ought to do.
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(a) One of the profoundest spiritual needs of Christendom is a true unity. The divisions among us are evils of gigantic import. They becloud the Faith, they mislead the wayfarer, they evoke the demons of envy and jealousy, they retard mis- sions, they prevent public education, they handicap charities, they waste money, they pierce through and through the heart of the Master. Christian unity, such as Christ prayed for, and his apostolic followers labored for, is yet in the maelstrom wherein the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace are whirl- ing uncertainly beneath the conflicting human powers of pride and arrogancy, prejudice and suspicion, grandiloquent optim- ism and disgusted pessimism, demands for submission, proffers of compromise, and decrees of laissez faire. Astound- ing spectacle! Nevertheless the steady eye of faith may still see the Spirit of God brooding above the troubled waters. In former years, our Church may have been as little disposed to adaptability as other Christian bodies. But since the Chicago- Lambeth propositions this may not fairly be said. With de- liberate publicity, she has avouched both her desire and her basis of treaty. If any other body has proffered as much of non-essential with equal loyalty to the apostolic faith and or- der, I am unable to name it. If any body has contrived a working platform of equal soundness and breadth for the ul- timate organic union of all Christendom Greek, Roman, Anglican, American and segmentary Protestantism, I know not where to look for it. The quadrilateral has been met with disdain on the one hand, and with mingled irritation and ridi- cule on the other. Nevertheless, both for itself and for the spirit in which it was offered, it still is worthy of the gratitude of distracted Christendom, and although for the present, it is submerged beneath the tumultuous waters that are still un- subdued by the Spirit sent in the name of Christ, yet in due time it will be taken up by that divine Spirit, and used as a principal factor in the problem of pacification. Let patience
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have her perfect work. God and time are sure master build- ers. Christian unity, though it come not through submission compelling dead uniformity, nor by levelling concessions which dissipate all that is eternally distinctive in the Christian Revelation, will yet come through the continuing prayerful co-operative endeavor of all loyal minded lovers of God and man.
(b) A marked characteristic of our age is its intellectual ac- tivity. It has been the irrepressible growth of the past cen- tury. I will not stop particularly to characterize its manifold expressions. I simply state the evident fact that the direct influence of mental intelligence upon spiritual feeling and aim is profound and often revolutionary. To-day the question is crucial-can man increase knowledge and retain his Christian beliefs? The counter-question to this is-can man with per- manent advantage increase knowledge and ignore the religion of Christ? It is for the Church to return no uncertain answer to these questions. If it is true, as Mr. Froude said, that "Science grows, and observers are adding daily to our knowl- edge of the material universe, but they tell us nothing of what we most want to know;" then the Church which is the ex- ponent of Christ's religion has a chief function to minister un- to this deepest and highest knowledge.
How far ought and may the Church adapt her faith and methods of religious education so as to bring the mind of the age into captivity to the law of Christ? Not so far as to con- nive at the abrogation of her Faith; not so little as to leave her stranded on the high and dry shore of permanent intellectual confusion. If she shall so utterly concede the revealed faith in the Incarnate Christ to the imperious demand of present day intellectualism as to consent that Christ shall be relegated simply to an honorable rank among the great spiritual masters of the world, she will forfeit her trust, and the axe of divine judgment will be laid unto her very root. Yet if she shall re-
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fuse to believe and act upon the conviction, that within the re- vealed Christian facts there is a perennial fountain of spiritual wisdom for quenching the thirst of man for the true knowl- edge of God and eternal life, then she will fail of her power to co-operate with the Spirit of truth in christening the mind of the world. Were I equal to the task, time would yet fail me to indicate what the Church Catholic might do, or even what our own branch of the Church is doing in the direction of a true adaptability. I simply affirm on the one hand that blind submission to a single alleged infallible authority in faith and morals insufficiently respects the practical rationality of the human mind, and tends still, as ever, to a subversion of the co-operating ability of man's reason in the appropriation of a living faith; and on the other hand, that unguided private judgment long since has put the Church face to face with the problem of how to preserve the Historic Faith from funda- mental evacuation. I believe our own Church has a clear call and a free opportunity to meet the issue between faith and rationalism. I believe she is awake to the issue. Her portals are wide, her foundation is at once broad and firm. Within the limits of loyal fidelity to the historic creeds and of rational regard to historic order, she has a welcome and a place for many schools of thought, among her leaders she has many of the master minds of the age; and if by God's grace she shall to herself keep true she cannot prove false to any man, but more and more worthily respond to her calling as the Church of the reconciliation.
(c) Finally there are the social needs of the age. The times bristle with problems of poverty and industrial disorder, of the clashing of classes, of municipal misrule and anti-patriotic un- righteousness. These profoundly affect the spiritual attitude and welfare of our people. Is the Church prepared to adapt herself so as to give Christ his proper determining value in the solution of these problems? It is impossible for her to be in-
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different to them, although it is difficult for her to hold the right proportion between a visionary spirituality and despirit- ualized secularity. But she cannot shrink back. She must hold herself by a double band of loyalty and sympathy to Christ and to all things that pertain to the coherency and up- lifting of human society. We Church people must needs con- fess that God's purpose is "in the fullness of times to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth," and that "the Church is the body of Christ, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." From the standpoint of this faith, who will draw the exact lines between things sacred and things secular? All life is sacred to God. Who will precisely discriminate between the ideal of the Christ- ian Church and the ideal of the Christian State? Let God work his strange work, and in his time the kingdoms of this world shall be the Kingdom of his Christ. The Church has been with one eye closed; and the Spirit of truth now knocks loudly at her door saying, "It is high time to be all awake." The Church may no longer merely propound spiritual ideals; she must with the grace of God work out those ideals in down- right contact with social needs. Shall the present generation of men, seeking in vain a true brotherhood within the Church, still strive to satisfy their need of fraternity in the increasing orders and associations outside the Church? Shall men and women, divinely endowed with intelligence and sympathy, and with unquenchable desire to work for a better social order, be forced to turn away from an unsympathetic and unpractical Church to other societies for the people's improvement, whose principles are indifferent if not antagonistic to the historic faith of Christianity? Shall there be over-repetition of the sad circumstance, a few years ago, of toiling workmen, stung by a sense of indifference, applauding the name of Christ and hiss- ing the name of the Church? Christ would not have it so. The Church, responding to the urgent call of the Spirit, can
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no longer suffer it to be so. Undoubtedly the Church, still lacking full equipment and working force, may not adequately supply all the needs of the times. Individuals working through voluntary associations which acknowledge no allegiance to the Church, besides municipal and state institutions, must and will continue to share in providing for the people's needs. But the Church must ever be at the forefront of the practical uplift- ing social forces, nor suffer herself to retire impotently to the rear; while continuously her indirect influence must work to keep alive Christian principles in all individual workers whatever be their particular association. None like her can speak so authoritatively, so persuasively in the august name of Jesus Christ. None like her can maintain the Spirit within the body of practical works. None like her can so read- ily marshal men and women of all classes to a disinterested co-operation on behalf of some great public cause, and at the same time fix an enlightened conscience, and set free a sus- tained inspiration for the permanent accomplishment of such cause. Already in our great cities Christianity is multiplying her agencies for practical ministration to the people; a fact of immense significance, for without doubt the city is getting to be the determining human power for the future good or evil of the country. In this arousing Christian work, our own Church is doing valiantly, as may be shown from the annual Year Books of an increasing number of parishes. Certainly our own Church has much to encourage her to even larger and nobler works. I mean not simply the general intelligence and wealth of our city congregations; but even more the underly- ing principle of her conservative adaptability, and especially her emphatic recognition of the co-operation of the laity in all that appertains to her practical governance and ministration. These are indeed times when our laity can most effectually supplement the peculiar functions of the clergy; not simply by generous money-giving, but by actual work along educa-
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