XXIII

CONTEMPT OF CHURCH

What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? Or despise ye the Church of God, and shame them that have not? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? I praise you not.-1 CORINTHIANS xi. 22.

IN the fair picture of the early Church, with its new life and brilliant hope, with its heavenly love and sweet charity and the unearthly beauty of a new type of holiness, there were some dark blots. Or rather these beautiful characteristics of the faith were soon menaced with the corruption that is in the world through lust. Abuses and disorders and irregularities very soon crept in to mar the harmony and disturb the peace. One of these was the degradation of the beautiful Love-Feast, as we see from St. Paul's sorrowing remonstrance. It is almost incredible to us that at the early time of writing this Epistle the sacred rite of the Lord's Supper should have been so profaned. It would be incredible, if we did not know how easily a good custom can lose its virtue. The worst corruption in the world is the corruption of the best.

To understand the abuse of the administration of the Lord's Supper recorded here it is necessary to recall the situation. Communion in the early Church was preceded by a meal, just as the first Communion followed on the Passover Feast. It was an actual supper, after which our Lord instituted the Sacrament. The early Christians met together to eat at a common table, and Agapæ, or Love-Feasts, was the name given to the common meal. Each brought contributions in kind as he was able, the rich of their plenty, and everything was distributed equally. Part of the gifts was reserved for the poor, especially for the widows and orphans. We can imagine what a splendid occasion it was for the exercise of Christian charity and Christian temperance. The underlying idea was that Christians belonged to each other, and were a brotherhood. They sat as one family in social as well as religious fellowship. In Corinth corruption of this beautiful custom crept in. The LoveFeast became sometimes a scene of selfishness and greed, the rich partaking of their own provisions without thinking of the others; and sometimes even it became a scene of revelry and excess. The poor were put to shame by being overlooked, and what shall we say of the scandal to the humble, pious souls? In such a prevalent practice there could be no dis

cernment of the solemnity of the rite that followed the meal, and of the sacred obligation of the brotherhood of the Church during the meal. We may well wonder how such license could come from such a sweet custom, but when men forgot the spiritual meaning of the meeting, and forgot the sacred dignity of the occasion, and forgot that it was no common meal but the Lord's Supper in commemoration of the death and love of Christ, anything might happen. We may wonder rather at the restraint and gentleness of St. Paul's rebuke, "What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? I praise you not." As a matter of history, the Church soon saw the danger of joining the sacrament with a social meal at which people of all grades of spiritual culture met, and was forced to dissociate the two.

Here in a series of questions St. Paul points out how unworthy their conduct was. He puts the celebration on its true level as a religious rite, tells the rich to take their meals at home, shows what a disgrace it was to degrade such a holy rite, and brings before them the two high motives which would prevent these disorders, one the motive of reverence, the other the motive of brotherly love. One question points to the sacredness of the occasion, which should save them from profaning it, "Despise ye the

Church of God?" The other points to the true love of their brethren, which would save them from putting the poorer members to shame by their selfishness, "Do ye shame them that have not?"

The conduct of the Corinthians showed lack of genuine and tactful love of others, and a lack of real reverence, as if they held in contempt the worship and fellowship which they met to celebrate. If they had any real appreciation of the ordinance, if they had true worship in their souls, and also any true conception of the dignity of their brethren in the congregation whom they were putting to shame, they would not desecrate the occasion as they did. In sorrow, and almost in irony that such should presume to hold contemptuous views of others, St. Paul asks, Despise ye the Church of God?"

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We to-day have no temptation to the same kind of error in connection with the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The temptation about it is rather the very opposite, to hold it in a reverence which tends to superstition, or to neglect it as something which is too high for us and removed from all contact with life. For example, the modern High Church practice prescribes Communion to be taken fasting. It seems absurd that a party which pre

tends to go back to primitive customs and faith should adopt a custom in this which is neither primitive nor scriptural. The tendency in this case is to make Communion a sort of occult rite with magical property conveying in some mysterious way virtue apart from spiritual capacity, so that it ceases to be what it certainly was in the early days, the symbol of the relation in which Christ and His followers stood always. In any case, we are in little danger of despising the Church of God in the same way as the Corinthians by turning Holy Communion into a revel.

But there are other attitudes of mind, of both those within the Church and those without it, possible to us to-day, which make the question still appropriate, "Despise ye the Church of God?" First of all, look upon the possibility of such an attitude within the Church itself. Whenever we are contemptuous of other types of Christian service and Christian worship and Church government, whenever we hold theories that would unchurch other Christian communities because they do not happen to agree with us in our traditional forms of church life, whenever we use bitter and insulting words regarding other denominations, when we are pharisaical in our judgment of a dominant church or