I. Gethsemane

GETIISLCMANIC

The whole of Nature exists on the principle of vicarious suffering; and to reject Christianity because of the doctrine of the Atonement is to reject Nature itself on the same account. To turn from Christianity in high-minded repudiation of the * injustice ' of the dogmas of Piiin as preached by her, and to seek peace and reassurance in the song of birds and the blossoming of flowers is, almost Uterally, to jump from the frying-pan into the fire. For the frying-pan at any rate stands for an attempt to use the fire intelligently, and the fire, unused, stands for mere destruction. Christianity at any rate suggests an endeavour to face facts and to interpret them; Nature offers the same facts without any interpretation. The shrike crucifies his food aUve; flowers bloom on corruption; robins kill their parents; all Hfe comes with birth-pangs, and exists only on terms of death. Man feeds on beasts; beasts on herbs; and herbs on minerals. These are facts, whether we like them or not. And Christianity at any rate encourages us to face them, and to say that minerals, by destruction, pass Up into herb-life; herb-life into animal; animal into human. Christianity goes even further and completes the cycle by giving us reason to believe that man, by suffering, becomes elevated, and rises even to be * partaker of the Divine Nature ' from whom all proceeds. If then these facts are contrary to our ideas of justice, we had better correct our ideas of justice, for they are simply untrue to life — whether of Religion or Nature.

In every world-religion,^ therefore, vicarious suffering plays a prominent part. No religion which does not in some manner deal with that which is the very principle of the universe as we know it, can possibly command for long any important proportion of the human race.^ A reUgion which does not recognise Pain as a redeeming or satisfying power is simply untrue to life and experience. Through the Old Law, therefore, sacrifice ran like a scarlet thread. In supernatural relations, as in natural, bulls and goats must die if man is to live. But it is reserved as the supreme and unique achievement of Christianity to recognise that the pain of Creation must involve the pain of the Creator — (since Love, and not mere force, is

• As a rough definition of a * world-religion ' i suggest, A religion that has numbered amongst its adherents at least a hundred million persons for a period of at least a thousand years.

' It is significant that Protestantism, as one of its main negations, rejected the Sacrifice of the Altar; and that Protebtantism as a system is crumbling away.

the mainspring of all life) — and to unclcTstand that God Himself out of His own Self-compellin/^ Love becomes a Lamb in order that He may die for the lost sheep — that ' the Son of Ciod became a Son of Man, in order (hat the sons of men may become Sons of God '; (iiat the Son of God dies that the sons of men may live.

We have seen how Jesus Christ Uves in His Cliurch; we have further to see how He dies in His Church. And first it is necessary to remember that Pain is not laid upon Him as upon an unwilling or unintelligent Victim; but how, before suffering externally. He stretches out His Hands to receive it — how He welcomes and takes down into the depths of His being, that He may first embrace it with His Will, that very pain by which He is to redeem the world.

In the Catholic Church this recognition of the principle of Pain is evident enough.

I. There are first the ordinary sorrows of the inner life in general.

Amongst non-Catholics pain is something of a puzzle. Non-Catholics usually seem to think that whatever else religion may fail to do for them, at least it must not fail to make them feel happy. If a man renounces the pleasures of sin, and accepts the hmitations and restrictions of the Divine Law, he demands at least that his religious emotions shall compensate and console him. But amongst Catholics it is a commonplace — la and especially amongst Catholic mystics ^ — that the Spirit of God is a sword that enters into the very deepest parts of the interior life; that desolations of soul, an agonised conscience, ' dark nights of the soul,' and the rest, are as normal accompaniments of true progress as are the exterior inconveniences and sorrows that greet the beginner.

Amongst the contemplative orders all this is, of course, the main part of their regular business. They go apart from the world, not, as shallow self-seekers seem to think, in order to escape Pain, but in order to seek it. They are specialists in suffering — not merely in physical suffering — in weariness, in the scourge, the hair-shirt, the plank-bed — these are scarcely more than symbols — but in interior desolation, in * derelictions,' in the loss of all consciousness of God, of all consolation and comfort, and above all in a sense of sin of which the world is simply unable even to form a conception.

2. Amongst Catholics alone, again, does it seem to be recognised that the sufferings of the individual benefit the world as a whole; that is to say, that the Pain-principle of Nature is a principle of Grace. If the Carthusian went into his cloister merely in order to save his soul, there would be something in the sneer of ' selfishness ' with which he is always assailed. For

• The mystics, it must be remembered, are not a ' school oi thought ' In the Church. They are only those who see a httle deeper than others into the dogmas which they hold in common with, and in the same sense as, oth«r Catholics.

non-Catholics — as a rule (.md finite natiinilly) — seem to be unabK' to n^f^.ird tlicinsclvos as anything but detachcnl units, each wholly self-contained and self-seeking. They are entirely without any glimpse of the vision of the Body of Christ, that vast supernatural organism in which the Lamb of God mystically suffers always — that organism in which the agony of one member draws off the poison from the rest — that organism of which the most honourable members are those in which Gethsemane manifests itself continually. This principle, then, runs through the whole of the Cathohc Church from head to foot. In her not only is the exterior sacrifice of the Cross offered without ceasing, in the august mystery of the altar — (since what Christ did once He does always) — in one mode; and, in another, in the exterior sufferings of her members; but the interior pains of Gethsemane are similarly perpetuated. Every true priest in the confessional knows something of the sense of sin borne by him on behalf of the penitent — ' I weep,* sobbed the Cure d'Ars, * because you do not weep '; every well-instructed Catholic know^s how to offer his own sorrow for the sake of another soul; for in the Catholic Church alone is manifested that Nation of Priests of whom the first Pope writes ^; for in the Catholic Church alone is tiiat vast principle of vicarious Pain welcomed,

• I Pet, ii. 9.

recognised and used, on which the whole chain of life, even in the physical order, hangs together.

3. We have then, in all this, one more amazingly vivid sign of the identity of Christ and His Church. Each aUke may use the same words; or, rather it is He Himself who, under two modes, uses the same words: ' All ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow Uke to My sorrow! ' * Here in My Church, and here alone, I re-enact to the full, willingly and intelligently, that agony recorded of Me in the Gospels. Here, in the cell of the Contemplative, in the confessional of the worthy priest, in the bedroom of the selfless sufferer — in every interior agony bravely borne, I once more he in the garden, bathed in blood, torn from Me, not by scourges, but by grief. Here, in the torturing sense of sin, borne by the innocent, once more the Prince of this world manifests His coming, though He finds nothing in Me; here, in every interior desolation, in the loss of friends accepted for the Great Friend's sake, in the lack of sympathy acquiesced in for the Great Love's sake — in all the loneUness, the misery of isolation, the silence, and the fierce resistance of the flesh against the spirit that holds it in check, is once more re-enacted the tragedy of the garden of long ago. See how My Diaconate of Three lies sleepmg for sorrow, a stone's throw away, and my Subdiaconate of eight at the garden door; while I lie here, alone and misunderstood, suffering that interior Passion of the Soul

PART in. PASSION AND RKJFCTION—GHTirSFMANK I IQ of which the exterior Passion oi th(* Body is scarcely more Ihan a shadow and a symbol. Here, in the Catliolic Churrh alone is (he agony of Gethsemane understood and li I(, for in the Catholic Church alone is it willingly and deliberately planned and welcomed.'