III

There is great need of a generous temper and an ungrudging way of viewing the opinions and expressions which are least congenial. Rough methods of controversy have done little to promote real understanding of the questions with which they have dealt. The denunciations of the sixteenth century, however excusable in their own day, bear across them the mark of failure. Not to recognise that crude ways of speech were a practical necessity of certain times for the preservation of spiritual doctrines, or that every age has its own imperfections of thought and expression and life, or that the great schoolmen used the intellectual methods which were of force for their own day, is simply to be false to history. To put out of court the explanations by theologians of the doctrines to which they are pledged is really an offence against plain and honest dealing. To insist on fixing a carnal and unspiritual view of divine and supernatural things on the utterances and acts of those who protest in their theology that their doctrines are spiritual and uncarnal is even more unjust than it would be to charge a theologian like Bishop Pearson with carnal teaching because he may have thought that the identical material particles of our present bodily life will be re-assembled in the body of the resurrection, and that our Lord in His ascension passed through local divisions of material space to a circumscribed heaven. Whole series of volumes of controversial theology leave the student wondering over the want of insight and imagination and candour and justice which led to their being penned. And, if it is true that champions of Protestant controversy have utterly failed to understand that which they have attacked, it is also true that there have been misunderstandings and consequent misrepresentations on another side. The rejection of a particular method of the presence of Christ has too often been understood as if it were the rejection of the presence of Christ altogether. The separation of His special presence from the elements has too often been thought to mean the assertion of His absence from the rite. The repudiation of particular notions of sacrifice has often been regarded as the denial of sacrifice in any true sense. Because many have avowed less than others would desire, they have often been supposed to acknowledge nothing at all. The warning that want of generosity will usually mean failure to understand comes from opposite camps. It is a reasonable conclusion that the official language and the official ceremonial of great Christian bodies call for a liberal and a considerate interpretation. The practical ecclesiastic no less than the theological student will do well to pause before he binds any such language or any such ceremonial to the narrowest interpretation of which it is capable, and to be quite sure of his ground before he says that a document or an action has closed a door. In the mystery of the Eucharist, where human thought is so apt to go astray, and human language is so inadequate to express even human thought, the interpreter will be most likely to be right who is patient of a wide latitude of interpretation and gentle towards what seem to him offending expressions. To press on the Thirty-nine Articles the narrowest interpretation of which they are capable and to extend as widely as possible the condemnations which they contain is to refuse to appreciate the lessons of history on the imperfections of the divines of the Reformation period. To make out that they impose as of obligation doctrines which they fall short of explicitly condemning is to be no less blind to opinions which prevailed among their compilers. To fail to see in the decisions of the Council of Trent the influence of a cautious and moderate policy is to be without recognition of the history and meaning of its work. Given the more generous estimate of the English Articles and the Tridentine canons, and there are ways open towards inner life and missionary enterprise on the part of both England and Rome, and perhaps towards ultimate re-union, which else must be closed. The temper which thus weighs the official documents and actions of the West is not unneeded also in all that concerns the relations of West and East. There is much in the East which wears a strange aspect to Western eyes. There is much in the West, and not least in the Church of England, which requires justification to Eastern minds. Here too power to understand and hope of friendship will make large demands on generosity of interpretation. And among all sections of Christians there is need of the remembrance that it is the positive and not the negative, the devotion and not the denunciation, which helps the soul.