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‘Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow=citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.’
Eph_2:19
The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ was a compact body of men holding together in the midst of the world, and visible to the eyes of all; and it was through membership in this body that they were to realise the great gifts of union with Himself and fellowship with one another. There they were to be united to Him so that together they could share the merits of His atoning death, receive together the grace of His redeeming life, and work together in the one fellowship for the salvation of the world.
I. That great conception—that the Christian life can only be realised in fellowship—is the basis of all Apostolic teaching.—From the isolation of merely individual life and opinion, from all the sundering forces of human distinctions of class and creed, men were to be gathered together into the one fellowship, regenerated by its life, fed by its holy food. They were to be no longer ‘aliens and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.’ Thus, my brethren, it would be true to say that the very object of Christ’s teaching of religion—nay, of His very mission from the Father—was to attach men to a body. May we not even dare to say—you will not misunderstand the words—that Christ came to make a man a Churchman?
II. Why is it that we find it so hard here in England to take to our living experience this essential truth of the Gospel?—It is partly because of our national temperament—so dull to all ideas which make demands upon thought and imagination. But it is also partly due to the circumstances of our national and our religious history. We have exaggerated and misinterpreted the great Protestant conception that a man’s religion is a matter of individual relationship between him and God. In the same way we have exaggerated and misinterpreted our great heritage of political freedom, so that an Englishman comes almost to think that his nation exists for the purpose of advancing his interests, protecting his commerce, and extending his resources. Thank God, we are beginning to outgrow the tendencies of this spirit. We are realising, and trying to teach in our schools, that a man’s life is bound up with his nation, that as he shares its blood, so he must be equal to all the demands for sacrifice which it makes upon him.
III. Now, does religion stand apart from this great principle, that life can only be realised in fellowship?—Nay, rather in religion—in the Christian religion—it is raised to its highest form and to its greatest power, so that we may say that the brotherhood of men with one another in the Church—with one another and with Christ—is to become more and more, in a sense which it has not been in the past, a light set before the eyes of men, from which, in the whole sphere of national and common life, they may learn what brotherhood and fellowship mean. Is this, then, the time in which we can settle the religious education of our children on a principle which entirely neglects and passes over this great conception of the Christian life—which teaches that religion is an affair of man’s own opinion, and that fellowship with Christ with other Christian men in the life of the body is only a matter of subsequent taste and temperament? Rather must we teach our children from the very first that they are related to God and to one another, because they are members of a great body knit together in a living fellowship—‘fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.’ Would God, indeed, that that conception could be realised through the life of one single all-embracing Church. So it was meant to be by the Lord Jesus, Who purchased His Church with His own Blood; but, alas! as it has passed down the ages it has been torn into many fragments, and the vision of one single Christian body is no longer what it was meant to be—a living fact—but only a distant hope. But is the principle itself in abeyance? Has it been withdrawn? Are we to take out great passages of the teaching of the New Testament? Has the principle been suspended until these distant hopes can be fulfilled? Nay, rather we are still called to act upon the principle that our Christian life is impossible without the reality of Christian fellowship.
—
Archbishop Lang.
Illustration‘I have been the undenominational man. I know the attractions of its convenience, of its plausible liberalism, of its specious charity. But, thank God, I have come to know also how powerless it is to vitalise the religious aspirations of a man’s soul or to strengthen his will; and, once into the life of the Christian there has come the vision of that great fellowship descending from our Lord Himself through all the ages and binding men together into one communion and fellowship with Himself and with the saints, then ever afterwards one of his passwords must be “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.” We cannot be “disobedient to the heavenly vision”; and therefore we cannot, without disloyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ and to His own method of teaching, come to any other principle than this: that the object of the religious teaching of our children in the schools must be to attach them to a religious denomination.’