Verses 4-5
The Catholic Church.
Let us recall what would be the general aspect of the Church of Christ, born into actual life on the day of Pentecost, as it passed away from under the dying eyes and hands of this very last Apostle left on the earth, who had seen the Lord. What would any one have found who had looked in upon it at the close of the century? What picture would he have painted? What would have been his primary impression? A good deal of detail may be hidden from us, but we can be fairly sure of the broad features that strike the eye, and we can be quite certain of the character of its inner secret.
I. And, first, it would show itself to him as a corporate society, a social brotherhood, a family of God. This family, this brotherhood, he would have discovered, had widely over-spread the empire, and in doing so distinctly followed the line of the Roman imperial system. That system, we know, was a network of municipalities gathered together into metropolitan centres. And the Christian society repeated in its own way, on its own methods, the general feature of this imperial organisation. Its life lay in towns; its ideal was civic; each city in which it established itself was a little centre for the suburban and surrounding districts. It was becoming clear its note was to be catholic. That was the outward society.
II. And inside what did the believer find? He found, first, a fellowship of holy and gracious living. To understand what this meant, try to recall the epistles of St. Paul, for you can feel still throbbing, as we know, in those epistles the unutterable ecstacy of the believers' escape out of what had before been their proverbial and familiar existence. St. Paul bids them keep ever in mind the old days from which they have fled fled as men fly from a wild and savage beast whose breath has been hot upon them, whose fangs and claws have been, and are still, too terribly near. We may read and enjoy the noble classical literature in which the old pagan world expressed, through the lips of its prophets and philosophers, its higher aspirations and its cleaner graces; but here in St. Paul we can still touch, and feel, and handle the ghastly history of the common pagan life, such as it was really known in provincial cities. The ideal of holy living, which before had been a weak dream, a dream that became daily more confused and despairing, was now a restored possibility. It had become possible that a whole society, a whole community of men and women, should live together for the purpose of high and clean life, with a positive hope of attaining it. That was the new attraction; that was the great change that had come over the situation a change from losing to winning. To pass from one state of things to the other was to pass from death into life; It was to them an undying and an unutterable joy.
III. It was a society of holiness, and a society of help, and then a society of help and holiness for all alike, out of every race, and at all social levels. Here, again, we know, was the secret of its power. A career of moral and spiritual holiness opened out to all women and to slaves. And how was it held together? Not by being a society of holiness, or a society of help; but its one indomitable and unswerving article of creed was that all this outward and visible organism was the outcome of a life essentially supernatural, invisible, not of this world, unearthly, spiritual, with which life believers stood in unbroken communion; for in their very midst, moving through the golden candlesticks, was an energising presence, loved as a friend is loved, known and clung to as a Redeemer, worshipped as God Himself is worshipped One who was as verily near, present, and alive with them as He was in the days of His flesh among the friends whom He had chosen. From His spiritual life they drank their life, united to it as limbs of one body to the head by inseparable union. Of this unalterable union every good word spoken, every good act done, by each and all, was the true and the natural fruit. This union was sustained by the constant intercourse of worship, and, above all, by that central act in which all worship concentrated itself and round which all services of prayer and praise grouped their office: that act in which the Church on earth ate of the living bread "the bread of eternal life, of which whosoever eateth shall never die."
H. Scott Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii., p. 360.
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