498TH ORDINARY MEETING.

MONDAY, MAY 17TH, 1909.

PROFESSOR H. LANGHORNE ORCHARD, M.A., B.SC., IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read and confirmed.

The following paper was then read by the author :

IT

AUTHORITY.

By The Very Rev. H. WACE, D.D., Dean of Canterbury.

[T will hardly, I think, be questioned that the subject of Authority, on which I am venturing to offer a few observations, is one of urgent practical importance at the present time. An indisposition to defer to authority is a conspicuous feature of life at the present day. The family life, the authority of parents-to modify a well-known phrase-has diminished, is diminishing, and grievously needs reinforcement. In politics we witness the growth of movements which, if not directly anarchical, propose to reconstitute life on bases of equality, from which the old authoritative organization would be excluded. Agitations, even by women, are conducted by means which involve violent repudiation of existing rules of order. In the Church, of which it has hitherto been considered a special duty to set an example of order, and of obedience to authority, we find clergy disregarding the directions of their ecclesiastical superiors, and openly and avowedly repudiating any obligation to obey the civil authority by which they and their Church are established. Abroad, particularly in France, we see the order of society threatened with entire subversion in the name

of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Not merely the Church, but all supernatural sanctions whatever, are repudiated by the French Government, and the spectacle offered by political and social life in that country seems simply that of a struggle for physical supremacy between various classes and interests and the Government of the hour. Italy presents a too similar spectacle, partly in spite of, and partly because of, the existence within it of a Church which claims absolute authority over all spheres of human life and thought. Amidst such confusions it would seem worth while to remind ourselves of what authority means-what is its source, and by what methods may it best be exercised.

If

If we look for the source of our idea of authority, we shall, I think, find it in the experience of our conscience. The sense of moral obligation, that we ought to do certain things, independently of the question what those things are, is the fundamental fact of moral life, and a primary instinct. The art of moral education depends upon the development and cultivation of this instinct. A child, indeed, soon finds that it must obey its parents because they can make it obey them; but if its obedience were based solely on that sense of superior force, it would acquire no sense of authority. It has been said that the first step in the moral battle of life is gained or won in the first conflict between the wills of mother and child. the mother resorts at once to force, if she drags the child, for instance, away from the fire, the first battle is lost, for the child has learned only to yield to superior force. But if, as wise mothers know how, she can restrain the child by the influence of her voice or look, the child has learned to obey a moral authority and the first moral skirmish is won. The Scriptures go straight to the heart of human life when they represent our first parents as placed under a moral obligation to obey a superior command. When that moral obligation was disregarded, nothing remained but to enforce it by the compulsory obligation of physical consequences, and that is the cardinal reality of human life to the present day. Disregard or disparage moral authority, and sooner or later you have, for the time, to resort to physical compulsion in the general interests of society, until you can work slowly backwards, as God has been doing throughout human history, to the re-establishment of moral supremacy.

But if our conscience thus affords the experience from which. we derive the idea of authority, we may be led by means of it to recognize the ultimate source of authority itself. It would

De impracticable on this occasion to pursue the full course of reasoning which justifies the conviction, expressed thousands of years ago in the 139th Psalm, that the voice of conscience is the voice of a personal God, a God who is in direct personal relation to us in our inmost souls, and from whose presence we can never escape. Nothing else, as has been shown with peculiar force by the late Dr. Martineau, will adequately explain the features of our moral consciousness. But, as the psalmist felt, this apprehension of God as the Lord of our conscience, as speaking to us in tones of authoritative command, involves the immediate recognition of Him as our Creator, and as knowing all the secrets of our frame and of our constitution. If this be the case, we are led to the recognition of there being one only living authority in the world, that authority being God Himself. Our Christian faith, indeed, establishes a supreme authority for us in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. But that, as He Himself says, is because as the Son of God, and authorized by His Father, He exercises His Father's authority. As St. Paul describes the constitution and course of the world, "Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all."

Thus the authority of our Christian Faith rests on the personal authority of Jesus Christ, and His authority rests on the personal authority of God the Father, whose voice, by His Spirit, speaks to our consciences. Our Lord accordingly treats. our acceptance of His claims as dependent on our antecedent submission to the voice of God. "He that is of God, heareth God's words; ye therefore hear them not because ye are not of God." The whole history of human thought and life thus becomes a continued variation of the narrative of the third chapter of the Book of Genesis. God is perpetually speaking to men and they are either obeying His words, or hiding themselves from Him, or rejecting Him. Even their purely intellectual history is of the same nature if, as Dr. Martineau so impressively urges, Nature is but the display of His will and His laws within the physical sphere. When the Greek geometers developed the laws of the conic sections, they might seem, for long afterwards, to have been spinning purely speculative webs of little practical import. But when Kepler ascertained that the heavenly bodies

moved in ellipses, it proved that Euclid and his fellows had been learning the Divine Geometry, and that the truths they had discovered were the utterance of the Divine Mind. Through Nature, God is perpetually impressing one aspect of His own nature and will upon the human mind, and ever since the reopening, at the Reformation, of a sense of free communion between God and man, and the consequent encouragement of free communion with Nature, we have been learning more, not so much of her secrets, as of His.

It should be observed that the advance of our knowledge of the laws of Nature affords a strong analogy to our apprehension of God's will on other subjects, and illustrates the nature of the ultimate authority in the sphere of morality and religion. The only authority respecting Nature is Nature herself. Men put forward from time to time theories of her constitution and hypotheses of her action, theories like the Ptolemaic system and hypotheses like that of Darwin, and these become subjects of acute controversy. But no controversial arguments can ever decide the issue. Theologians or philosophers may dogmatize on either side; but what settles the matter is the voice of Nature herself, heard in further observations or experiments. Men may, at first, misunderstand God's voice in Nature, but He goes on speaking, and to those who go on listening, the misunderstanding is sure to be removed. Only four centuries ago, the Church was considered an authority on Nature. Sometimes great schools of scientific thought have exercised a paramount authority for a while, and have delayed advances in the interpretation of Nature. But the scientific world is now, probably, for ever emancipated from any such control, and all scientific thought is in the attitude of Samuel-" Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth."

But the idea still lingers in others spheres of life and thought that there exists some human authority to which we can resort for the decision of questions of thought and action, and to which unquestioning deference is due. There is no doubt that men and women are constantly feeling after some such authority with a dim instinctive craving, and it is their very longing for it that too often renders them the victims of the first bold authoritative voice which asserts a claim over them. This constitutes, to a large extent, the strength of the Roman Catholic Church, and of that section of our own Church which so nearly approaches the Roman Church in character. In each case, the alleged authority is that of the Church. In the case of the Romanist, that authority is plain, visible and accessible. The Roman

Church is now concentrated in the Pope, and every Bishop or Priest represents and enforces his authority. For the section of our own Church to which I refer, there is no such visible and definite authority to be appealed to; but none the less the word "Church," and the supposed authority of what is called "The Church," exercises an almost magical influence. Practices are introduced among us, and enforced as matters of moral obligation, on no other ground than that they have the alleged authority of the Church. Other practices, which have seemed to many good men not merely convenient and harmless, but highly conducive to the maintenance of spiritual life among large and laborious classes, are not only discouraged, but vehemently denounced, on no other ground than the alleged authority of the Church. Above all, a certain system of doctrine, and a certain tone and character of worship, are alleged to be "Catholic," or in a special sense characteristic of "The Catholic Church"; and those who do not adopt this system and these customs are treated as defaulters to a recognized ideal. This ideal of the Church, or of the Catholic Church, assumes an imposing shape in the imagination, and Societies are formed, and religious newspapers conducted, with the definite object of making this ideal supreme in the English Church.

And yet there exists no reality, and since early times there has existed none, for which this ideal authority can be claimed. For a period, indeed, which has been limited by the present Margaret Professor at Oxford-no harsh judge on such matters-to about four centuries after Christ, concluding with the year A.D. 451,* there was a sufficient unity and continuity in the teaching, practice, and government of the Church to render it possible to recognize that that teaching, practice, and government had the marks of Catholicity. At the same time, it cannot for a moment be admitted that the rites and ceremonies then prevailing are, by reason of their Catholicity within that period, binding upon ourselves now. Some of the most conspicuous ceremonies then practised, alike at Baptism and at the Lord's Supper, are by general consent disused, and their re-introduction would never be suggested, even by those who are most urgent in asserting the authority of the Catholic Church. Many of the early Canons are quite impracticable for

* See Dr. Sanday's Letter in the Report of the Fulham Conference, 1900, p. 40.