Benediction

Yesterday afternoon, as it was darkening to dusk, I stepped into the Catholic church, and found a service in progress.

It was an astonishingly simple one.

Father Thorpe had set up above the altar a large, flat, gilt vessel with a glass centre, in the midst of which could be seen the white disc of the consecrated Host; and about it burned a dozen candles. There was a boy or two on the altar steps, and a number of children in the body of the church who were singing a hymn on their knees, while the clergyman swung a censer two or three times before handing it back to his companion.

Then there followed a Litany to Mary the Mother of Jesus, and a collect; then another hymn and another collect; after which the priest went round behind the altar, took down the monstrance, and, carrying it to the front, made a large sign of the cross with it over the congregation. Then he replaced, as I suppose, the consecrated Host within the tabernacle while the congregation sang a short psalm; and the service was over.

I was so much interested and surprised that I made an opportunity to inquire of the sacristan what it was that I had witnessed, and, from his explanations, and a hymn-book that he allowed me to borrow, I think I have by now tolerably understood the meaning of the very simple ceremonies of the afternoon.

Briefly, the whole affair rested, as so many other functions of the Catholic Church, upon her belief that the consecrated Host really and truly is the Body of Jesus Christ.

It is of no kind of use to attempt to understand or even to criticize effectively this service of Benediction, as it is called, unless one first takes for granted this faith in the Sacramont. "NVitlioul that faith, all is indeed superstitious and meaningless; with it, it becomes intelligible and natural.

The idea, I imagine, is something as follows.

When a soul approaches her Creator, she does so in order both to give and to get; to praise Him and to pray to Him. In Mass, a sacrifice is offered, and the etiquette, therefore, is somewhat formal and stiff; a liturgical form is found to be both suitable and instructive. But Almighty God is not only infinitely far. He is also infinitely near; He is not only complex in His operations and attributes, but He is simple in His nature — and this, I suppose, is what Christ meant to teach us when He said that God was Love, that He was our Father, that He was Light, and so forth.

Now, all this is acknowledged, and indeed insisted upon, by the Protestant, who has a clearer view of God's love than of His majesty, of His simplicity than His complexity. We are told at Exeter Hall that we need no churches nor images nor ceremonial, that God is a spirit, that a gathering round the family coffee-pot may be as pleasing to Him as the most gorgeous procession, terrible with banners; and in one sense, of course, I fully agree with the rhetorician. I take it that the Christian Revelation proves to us that we have access to the Father; that mental prayer may reach His throne no less surely than plainsong; that God, who is simple, likes His children to be simple too.

Well, Benediction seems to show to me that the Catholic Church fully recognizes these facts. It is true that she believes what the Protestant rejects, namely, that the Sacrament is really and truly the Body of Christ, but this belief illustrates to my mind her superior simplicity of attitude: her doctrine of the Real Presence in itself is not the climax of an elaborate logical process — the elaborateness of her exposition of it was only forced out of her by the elaborateness of the attack — in its essence it is merely an entirely simple acceptance of the words of her Master, "This is My

Body": she accepts neither more nor less than the bare meaning of the words as they stand. It is His Body, she says; and since He is aUve, where His Body is, He is. Therefore the Sacrament is Jesus Christ, and must be treated Hke Jesus Christ.

In Benediction, then, she acts upon her faith with an extreme directness. The Real Presence is a mystery, of course, as regards its mode, but no mystery as regards its fact — or rather it is one of those mys-teries that it is her ceaseless business to disclose. God is there, and must be treated as God; therefore she takes the three symbols — music, lights, and incense — those three symbols that man has somehow always associated with divine worship, and employs them in her devotion: moreover, she aims them directly at that holy thing which she declares to be God; she addresses Jesus Christ as the Salutary Host, she sends up her fragrant smoke immediately before the monstrance, she burns her candles immediately round it. Finally, at the very end, her priest speaks no word; he must not come between God and the souls of His children; therefore he envelops his hands in a cloth, and in dead silence permits Jesus Christ to use him almost mechanically in the Divine bestowal of the blessing of peace. He lifts and moves the Sacred Host in the form of a great cross, but he is silent; Another is speaking soundless words in his stead.

Let us have done, then, with this Protestant claim to simplicity. Compared with the elaborate doctrines of Anglican and Nonconformist divines — their safe-guardings, their hesitations, their agnosticisms, their refusals to define, their volumes of negation and warning, — the Catholic faith is as a naked statue set by the side of an elaborately costumed wax-work figure. Mr. Marjoribanks once told me that the Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist would occupy a couple of hours for its adequate statement; Father Thorpe told me that the Catholic doctrine can be stated in four words, and those Christ's HOC EST CORPUS MEUM. Compare again, let us say, Evening Prayer with Benediction; and it is a fair comparison, for each alike is at the present day the normal service of Sunday evening, each in its respective communion. The one is an extremely beautiful and scholarly composition, drawn, it is true, almost entirely from Catholic Vespers and Compline, but can it be compared for simplicity and direct appeal to the ignorant and heavy-laden, with that amazingly plain and moving ceremony which I have described? I do not say that Evening Prayer is not admirable for the learned and devout, just as Vespers among the Papists is extremely suitable for monks and holy persons, and as it was once suitable even for the masses w^hen they understood what it was all about and were able to answer the priest intelligently. But in our own days, when the cry for simplicity and Gospel teaching and Jesus Only is waxing louder and louder among those who are in the least interested in

Christianity, and when a total lack of interest in both faith and morals is becoming more and more evident among the rest, can it be denied that Benediction seems almost to have been inspired from Heaven, to combine directness of appeal, easiness of comprehension, and proclamation of the central doctrine of the Catholic creed, all in one unliturgical quarter of an hour? It comprises the unformality of general hymn-singing without its purposelessness, the freedom of the prayer-meeting without its wild undogmatism, the eloquence of the preacher without the distraction of his personality, the impressiveness of sacerdotalism freed from the clerical element. It demands no vivid sense of the omnipresence of God, for there He is within that little white circle; no high spiritual soarings, for He is not a hundred yards away; no straining of the eyes in the realm of faith, for here He is all but in sight.

Now, I am aware that there are a hundred retorts available; and ilic first, that in fact which Mr. Marjoribaiiks has stated more than once with his usual fervour, is that the whole affair is grossly materialistic.

I do not propose to answer this at any length; but I will content myself with assertincr once more that it is neither his business nor mine to find fault with God's methods when once it is clear that they are His methods. I do not wish to entangle myself in Anglican subtleties; I will only say that if it is really true that the Sacrament is Christ's Body, I cannot understand how it can be materialistic to treat it as such; or if it is materialistic (though I shrewdly suspect that my friend does not realize the meaning of the word), then it is right to be materialistic because God Almighty wishes us to be so. The whole thing stands and falls by the reality of the Presence.

But the Vicar of St. Symphorosa would chime in here.

"My dear sir," he would say, "it is useless to talk like that. I am as firm a believer in the Real Presence as yourself; but I would not dream of treating the Holy Sacrament with such offensive familiarity. Christ ordained it for the offering of the Holy Sacrifice and the Communion of His Body and Blood, and we have no right to use it for any other purpose — and as a proof of this I would remind you of the fact that Benediction was an unknown service in the early Church, that it was not introduced into England until after the Reformation, and that the Eastern Churches to this day know it not."

Now, this objection appears to me far more worthy of an answer than Mr. Marjoribanks'; yet I do not intend to answer it at length, or to plunge into deep controversy. I will only say this.

I distrust the appeal to the early Church with all my heart. It appears to me, when I hear it from the mouth of Anglicans, to be always accompanied by a sense that the Church of God is a kind of antiquarian institution whose business it is to attempt to reproduce in modern times a state of tilings from which we have been purposely delivered by Almighty God. We might as well insist upon carpeting our floor with rushes, and deprecating the use of forks, because the Elizabethans had a better taste in domestic architecture than ourselves. There is no harm, of course, in such fads, if we take them up merely as pastimes and pretences; but they become fanatical nonsense so soon as they are seriously assumed. To my eyes, God is the God of the living, not of the dead; it is He who has made us, and we must not try to unmake ourselves; it is He who has substituted wheels for rollers, steamships for barges, forks for fingers, the electric telegraph for mounted couriers. His idea surely remains the same throughout, that we should live our life, go on journeys by land and sea, eat our food, and hold communion with one another; and He supplies means after means, now more simple, now more complicated — the pendulum of discovery continually swings from side to side; a new force is unearthed, new machinery springs into complex existence.

and presently subsides again into simplicity — and all the while the business of life goes forward swifter and swifter towards its final consummation.

Now, why, in His Name, should the business of worship alone stand still? Why should not new methods be continually devised, elaborated, simplified, and even superseded, so long as the principle remains the same — the faith once delivered to the Saints? Father Thorpe, as he lifted the monstrance in silence, meant precisely what St. Paul meant as he lifted the tiny white fragment from the cracked plate in the upper room at Ephesus, crying, "The Body of the Lord broken for you!" Each alike honoured God, declared the Faith, and desired that through that Living Bread the people might be succoured.

What business has this clergyman to protest and criticize? Let him rather look to himself that in rejecting life and development he may not be rejecting the Lord of them both; that in his zeal for English antiquarianism he may not be faithless to Him before whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free; that in his anxiety to be faithful to ancient practice he may not betray Ilim who is unchanging in a thousand forms and under ten thousand symbols, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

Such, then, are my first impressions of Benediction. It is true that possibly after a while I might find it wearisome; but I do not think I could find it wearisome if I loved Jesus Christ, and believed that He was really there. A child who climbs on his mother's knee night after night with the same words, or a boy who is blessed every night by his father and told to be good, can scarcely find these ceremonies tiresome unless there is some shadow between him and his parents. Therefore, if I should find myself wearied of the perpetual Tantum ergo and Adoremus in aeternum, I should look for the reason, not in those pulsating songs of joy, but in my own cold heart: I should ask myself, as in fact I do.

whether I truly beheve that Jesus Christ is really present, and whether I do find Him fairer than the children of men.

Yes, these questions are the important ones to ask. We want no philosophical or antiquarian discussions....